Product updates

Hearso changelog

The useful version: concise release notes, with no account details, credentials, internal endpoints, or operational secrets.

v0.8.0

Your results stay on screen until you leave them. They used to disappear ten seconds after the game ended, often before anyone had finished reading the scores.
The leaderboard highlights you, not whoever is in first place — and each board has its own colour, so you can tell at a glance which one you are looking at.
Leaderboard rows keep their shape on any screen. Names, scores and countries stay put instead of shifting about on a phone.
The player running the room is always listed first, so it is clear who can start the game.
A room only passes to someone who is actually still there. It could previously be handed to a player who had already closed their browser.
A tidier top bar and a footer you can find things in.
Signed-in accounts no longer hold database permissions over game rooms that they never used.

Rooms no longer depend on one person staying. If the host leaves or drops off, the room passes to someone still playing. A room the last player walks out of stops being offered to others.
You can rejoin a room you left, and take your seat back if one is free.
Rooms tell you who joined, who left, and when the room has become yours to run.
Leaving a room you host asks first, and says what will happen to the room.
A Refresh button on the open-rooms list, which also keeps updating on its own.
Hearso runs with the narrowest database permissions the game needs.
Our record of what data we process, and why, is back in step with the app.

Open rooms: a host can let anyone join, and you can browse the open rooms and pick one. Listing is opt-in and off by default, so private team rooms stay private.
Leaving a room works. It used to be a link that only took you back to Play — your seat stayed occupied and the round kept waiting. Now the seat is freed and your score stays on the scoreboard.
If the host leaves, the longest-standing player takes over so the game can finish.
You can delete your account from Settings — profile, email, reviews, and your name in every room you joined. Your leaderboard entry is held by a separate service and is removed on request; the confirmation says so before you decide.
Double-clicking “Reveal answer” no longer skips the reveal. The button now does the work once however many times you press it, and is disabled while it works.
A player who leaves is gone from the room. Their name used to linger in the player list, and the round still counted them among the people it was waiting for. Their score stays in the final results, where they earned it.
Messages explaining why a join failed now actually appear; “This room is full” was being replaced by a generic message.
The room list tells you when it cannot reach the server, instead of showing an empty lobby either way.

A “Built on” strip on the home page names the services Hearso runs on. It pauses on hover or keyboard focus, and holds still if you prefer reduced motion.
Rooms are no longer removed while a game is in progress — the 24-hour clock now runs from the last activity in a room rather than from when it was created.
Analytics no longer receive the text of answer choices. Automatic click tracking read the label of whatever was clicked, and on an answer button that label is the answer.
A security contact is published at /.well-known/security.txt so a vulnerability can be reported privately.
Player identities keep the number that tells apart two players who drew the same generated name.

A clearer mobile navigation bar links Home, Play, Leaderboard, and account settings.
Games now include 10 questions with 10 seconds to answer each one.
Answer timing, room sharing, and final-results sharing make live rounds easier to follow.
Guest nicknames are office-safe, compact, and less likely to collide.
Security headers and room-participant checks strengthen public gameplay.
Privacy-safe usage counts: Hearso records how many rounds are played, how many people play, and how many are playing at once — never names, emails, or room codes. What is kept, and for how long, is described under Privacy and safety in the player guide.

How we build it

Decisions we have settled on and intend to keep, so you can tell what to expect of a room before you walk into one.

Rooms look after themselves: No game should hang on one person staying connected. If the host goes, the room finds a new one. When the last player leaves, the room retires rather than sit there looking joinable.
Leaving never rewrites the game: Your seat is freed. Your score stays where you earned it.
The server runs the game: Questions, timing and scoring are decided on our side, not in your browser, so a round means the same thing for everyone in it.
We take the minimum: Of what we keep about you, and of what the app itself is allowed to touch.
Every version shows up here: Including the ones that fix our own mistakes.