A little less
mystery.
Webhole is an independent, experimental browser game. The extension and demo change your browser’s view of a page. They don’t delete or edit the original website.
Offline preview
The game works locally until you explicitly join a shared world. Preview bites are reversible: Z undoes the last bite, and Escape restores the page. No gameplay claims are sent in this mode. The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which still processes ordinary connection metadata when you load it. No analytics, ads, trackers, or third-party fonts are included.
Shared world
Joining shares hashed page, block, and snapshot identifiers and a random player ID with this server. Successful claims are stored with timestamps and version numbers in Cloudflare’s SQLite-backed Durable Objects. Page text, HTML, form values, selectors, screenshots, and URL strings are not included in claim payloads.
Hashes are not anonymity. Public URLs and text can be guessed and compared against hashes. A player ID can link claims. The server and Cloudflare see ordinary IP/network metadata. This implementation uses the client IP temporarily for rate limiting and does not include it in the permanent game ledger.
Only join on public pages. Don’t use shared mode on email, account, medical, financial, internal, or other private pages. Form fields and common live/ad regions are excluded, but automatic filtering can’t know whether a page is sensitive.
What “permanent” means here
A block can be claimed once within this deployment. The first atomic server claim wins. Reloading, rejoining, undoing a local view, or changing the page snapshot does not erase the ledger. There is no player-facing reset or deletion endpoint, and claims have no automatic expiry. This is an experiment, not a promise that the service or its data will exist forever.
Permissions stay explicit
The Chrome extension requests activeTab and scripting at installation. It only injects after you click its toolbar button. Optional server access is requested for the backend you connect in Options. Shared mode requires a separate opt-in on each page. Browser internal pages, the Web Store, and some PDF viewers can’t run the game.
Limits, honestly
There are no accounts, trusted anti-cheat, financial rewards, or authoritative page crawler. Clients can forge claims. Best-effort rate limits and per-page capacity exist, but they are not a global abuse or cost guarantee. This public prototype is intended for experimentation, not a valuable scarce-resource economy.
Changed content, personalized pages, DOM restructuring, or responsive layouts can change block identity. Shadow roots and iframe contents are not scanned. Very large atomic content may be too large to eat. A disconnected backend pauses shared gameplay rather than pretending a claim succeeded.
Getting out
Escape restores the browser view. In extension Options, choose “Use offline preview” to disconnect the backend. You can revoke optional site access or uninstall the extension from your browser’s extensions page. These actions do not erase prior shared claims.