What anonymous means here
You are not asked for a real name, an email address, a phone number, a date of birth or a photograph, and there is no registration step in which to ask. A nickname of up to eight characters is the entire identity you carry into a room, and you choose it again each time you arrive. Nothing links the nickname you use today to the one you used last week, and nothing links either to you.
To the other people in the room you are the nickname and the words you type. They cannot see where you are, what you are using, or anything you have said anywhere else. There is no profile to click on, because there are no profiles.
What is not anonymous
Anonymity on any website has a floor, and it is honest to say where this one sits.
The server sees IP addresses. Alongside every message we log the time, the IP address it came from and the nickname it used. That exists so that somebody flooding a room or abusing people can be dealt with, and it is written down in the privacy policy rather than buried. Other people in the room never see it.
The chat is not end to end encrypted. Your connection to the site is encrypted in transit, which stops anybody in between from reading along, but the messages arrive on our server in a readable form so that the room can show them to everybody in it. If your threat model requires that the operator of a service cannot read what passes through it, this is not the tool for that, and we would rather say so than let you find out later.
The site measures its visitors. Two analytics tools record the page visited, the referring page, the country, and the browser and device type, one of which stores an identifier in your browser to tell a returning visit from a new one. There is no advertising on the site and none of it is sold. The privacy policy names both tools.
And anybody with the link can walk in. A room is unlisted rather than secret: it appears nowhere on the site and search engines are told not to index it, but the address is the only lock on the door.
Making a room for a group
Put a name after the address and that room exists: klaklak.com/quiet-thursday. Send the link to the people you want in it. Everybody picks a nickname on the way in and the conversation is live. There is no invite list to manage and nobody has to be added, approved or told to install anything.
The name is the whole security model, so choose it accordingly. Something long and specific is not guessed; a single common word like chat or hello almost certainly already has strangers in it.
Keeping the room civil without a registration wall
Most sites use accounts as their moderation tool: misbehave and you lose the account. There are no accounts here, so the tools work differently. Whoever opens a room holds the moderator role and keeps it across reconnects, which means deleting a message, removing somebody, or banning them from coming back. Anybody at all, moderator or not, can ignore a nickname with one tap and stop seeing that person entirely. There are also automatic limits on how fast and how repetitively one person can post, which is what stops a flooder.
What there is not is a moderation team watching the rooms. A room is looked after by the people in it.
Questions people ask
Do I have to register to use it?
No. There is no registration step at all, so there is no email address, password or verification message. You type a nickname of up to eight characters on the way into a room and that is the whole process.
Do you know who I am?
Not by name. We hold the nickname, the time and the IP address attached to each message, which is there for handling abuse and disappears with the room. We hold no name, email address, phone number or account, because you were never asked for any.
Is the chat end to end encrypted?
No. The connection is encrypted in transit, but messages reach our server readable so the room can display them to everyone. Private one to one messages between two people are the exception: those pass between the two browsers and are never stored.
Can other people in the room see my IP address?
No. Other users see your nickname and your messages and nothing else. There is no profile, no location and no device information visible to anybody in the room.
Can I be anonymous to the other people in the group?
Yes, and that is the normal case. Pick a nickname that is not your name, do not type anything that identifies you, and there is nothing in the room connecting your messages to you. The care needed is in what you write, not in the settings.
What stops somebody from ruining an anonymous room?
Three things. The person who opened the room can delete messages, remove people and ban them. Anybody can ignore a nickname with one tap. And automatic limits stop one person posting too fast or repeating the same line. There is no moderation team beyond the people in the room.