Anonymous, in the only way that counts
Every other tool in this category is seat-based with a login, which means "anonymous" is a promise: they hold your identity and have chosen not to show it to your manager. You are asked to trust a setting.
Here there is no account, no email address, no cookie and no analytics on the pages your team uses. There is nothing stored that could identify a respondent, so the claim is not a policy — it is a fact about the database. Even the organiser sees exactly what everyone else sees. There is no admin view, and no way for us to add one without changing what the tool is.
Two details do the real work:
- A week is published only once it has closed. While a week is running you see a response count and nothing else. This is the one that actually matters: any figure that moves when somebody answers tells you what they answered. Load the page, wait for a colleague to respond, load it again, and the bar that changed is theirs. A closed week is a fixed set and cannot be watched that way.
- Quiet weeks stay hidden even after they close. Under four responses, nobody sees the average — not the team, not you. On a team of six, an average of three answers with one visible low score is the same as naming the person who gave it.
- Your words get no record of their own. A week's comments all go into a single list that is reshuffled every time someone adds to it, so there is no entry belonging to you sitting next to your score. Matching a distinctive turn of phrase back to the 1 it came with is how most "anonymous" surveys actually identify someone, and it is worth saying that the first version of this got it wrong: comments were stored as their own rows, which put them in order right beside the scores. One query undid the whole thing.
- A word said once doesn't appear. The cloud only shows words two or more people used. One person's unusual word is a fingerprint.
Why weekly, and why one link
The failure mode of a team survey is that it becomes a project. Someone has to send it, someone has to chase it, and by the third month it is a calendar invite everyone declines.
This is one URL that never changes. The team bookmarks it, taps a number on Friday, and that is the whole ritual. Nothing to send, nothing to chase and nothing to set up again. The week rolls over on Monday morning by itself.
What you actually see
- Last week's average out of five, and the spread across 1–5, published once the week has closed.
- A running count for the week in progress — how many have answered, and nothing more.
- A trend across recent weeks, so a bad week reads as a bad week rather than a crisis.
- A word cloud of what people wrote, sized by how many people said it.
What you never see is a name, and there is no export that would give you one.
FAQ
Can the organiser see individual responses?
No. There is no organiser view of responses at all — the person who set it up opens the same page as everyone else and sees the same aggregate. Nothing identifying is stored, so there is nothing to reveal.
What stops someone answering ten times?
Only this browser remembering that it already answered this week. That is deliberate: anything stronger would mean identifying people, which would cost more than it is worth. This measures a mood, not an election.
Why can't I see this week's results until it closes?
Because a live average is a way of reading individual answers. Look at the page, wait for one person to respond, look again, and the difference is that person's score. Publishing only finished weeks is the only version of this that actually keeps a response private, and it is worth the wait.
Why hide the result when only a few have answered?
Because on a small team, an average of two or three responses points straight at whoever gave the low one. Four is the smallest number where a single outlier is not automatically attributable.
How long is history kept?
About six months of weeks. Older weeks are dropped automatically, whole weeks at a time, so what remains is never a partial sample of a week.
Do people need an account?
No. Nobody signs up, nobody gives an email address, and there is nothing to install. That is what makes the anonymity real rather than promised.
Can I use it for something other than a mood check?
Yes — the question is yours to write. Teams use the same thing for workload, confidence in a deadline, or how a new process is landing. Anything that fits a 1–5 and a few words.
Related
For something lighter every morning there is a daily question with a live vote, and stand-up games that fit in ninety seconds. To get people talking across teams rather than measuring how they feel, there is coffee roulette.