The sidebar

Talk about any page, from the page

The Yakkery extension adds a sidebar to your browser. Open it on any page to see what members are saying about that page, a short summary, and similar sites people are talking about. Write a take without leaving the page. Select a passage and quote it.

After you install

• Pin the Yakkery icon to your toolbar. Click the puzzle-piece icon next to the address bar, then the pin beside Yakkery.
• On any page you want to talk about, click the Yakkery icon. The sidebar opens beside the page.
• Choose Sign in. A yakkery.com window opens; sign in there, and the sidebar is ready.
• You can also right-click selected text and choose Quote on Yakkery.

What it will and won't do

• Yakkery reads the address of the page you are on for one reason: it is what tells the sidebar which conversation to show you. The address names the room.
• That address is sent when you open the sidebar on a tab, or choose a Yakkery item from the right-click menu — not before, and not on tabs you never opened it on. The conversation count on the icon is the one thing that works differently, and it is off until you turn it on; see below.
• When you open it on a page, it sends that page's address, canonical address, title, description, language, and preview image. The text of the page is never uploaded; only a passage you choose to quote is sent, with your take — together with up to 64 characters either side of it, which is what lets Yakkery find your quote again if the page changes.
• The conversation count on the icon is off until you turn it on. It sends only the first 5 characters of a code worked out from the page address, with no cookie and no sign-in, so it is not tied to your account — though your network address is held for about a minute to limit abuse, and it does tell us which pages the browser visits, so leave it off if you would rather it did not.
• "Who's here" is off by default and only shows people who also turned it on. You drop off when you close the sidebar, or within 90 seconds if the browser closes first. It is never saved to our database.
• "Save image to Yakkery" in the right-click menu sends only that image's address, the page's address and its title, and only when you choose it. Yakkery fetches the image (respecting robots.txt), keeps a small private copy with its metadata removed, and shows it only to you, with a link to the page.
• Yakkery's own crawler reads public pages and respects robots.txt.
• It stays off on sites you list, and on banks, payment services and patient portals from the start.
• It doesn't run in private windows unless you allow that in your browser's settings, and even then "Who's here" and the count stay off.
• It asks for no "read all websites" permission when you install it. It reads the current tab only when you open it there, or on sites where you turn on Always run.

More detail is in the privacy policy.