What we have changed, and why.

We now count visits to this website, and we are going to pay for adverts

Two changes, both about finding the first forty people rather than about you.

We have switched on Cloudflare Web Analytics. It counts how many people land on a page and which link sent them. It sets no cookies, keeps nothing on your device, and has no way to tell one visitor from another or to follow you anywhere else. We picked it over the usual choice, Google Analytics, precisely because it cannot do those things. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.

If you arrive from an advert, the registration form now records which advert it was. Not who you are — which advert. If we are going to spend money bringing people here, we should know which spending worked, and the alternative is guessing. That detail sits in the same private spreadsheet as the rest of your registration and is never shown to anyone, including the person you meet.

The campaign details are kept briefly by your own browser, for up to thirty days, so that clicking an advert on Tuesday and registering on Friday still counts as the same arrival. Clearing your browsing data removes it.

What has not changed: we do not run advertising trackers, we set no cookies of our own, and nothing about you is sent to Meta, TikTok, Reddit, Nextdoor or anyone else. The adverts point at this page; this page does not report back.

Not turning up now has a consequence. Cancelling still does not.

Three times now, somebody has kept an hour of their Sunday free, joined on time, and sat in an empty room waiting for a person who never came. One of them waited forty minutes. That is the worst thing this service can do to someone, and until today the only thing standing against it was good intentions.

So: two no-shows and your membership is paused. Not as a punishment. Because if you keep your word, you deserve to be matched with someone who keeps theirs.

Cancelling is not a no-show and never counts as one. It is completely fine, it never needs a reason, and there is no limit on it. Cancel before Saturday noon and we can usually give your place to somebody else. After that we probably cannot — but telling us still means your match is not sitting there wondering what happened, and that is most of what matters. Even twenty minutes before is worth sending.

The old wording said “cancel by Saturday noon” and stopped there, which read as though a Sunday-morning emergency was too late to bother mentioning. It is not. Tell us whenever you know.

A pause is never permanent. Reply to any email from us and you are back, no explanation needed.

The rating form was broken, and one of you told us

On some screen sizes the crisis-helpline notice at the bottom of the page was sitting on top of the questions, so the buttons could not be clicked — and because one of those questions is required, the form then refused to send at all.

It is fixed. If you tried to rate a conversation and could not, that was us and not you. Our thanks to the member who took the trouble to write and explain exactly what was happening rather than simply giving up; at least one other person hit the same wall the same evening and said nothing.

We no longer ask for your mobile number

The form used to ask for it and said it was for a reminder text before your conversation. That reminder text does not exist. It was never built, so it has never once been sent, and we were holding a phone number for a reason that was not real.

That is not a small thing to get wrong. You are only supposed to be asked for what is actually needed, and we told you in writing what it was for. So the field is gone, and every number already given to us has been deleted.

Two members said this field was the thing that nearly stopped them signing up. One of them typed a zero into it rather than hand it over, which was a fair response to being asked for something we did not need.

If we ever do build reminder texts, we will ask you then, and you will be free to say no and carry on as normal.

Open to all of Ontario, not just Toronto and the GTA

Until today you had to live in Toronto or the GTA. That restriction is gone. Anywhere in Ontario. Hamilton, Ottawa, London, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, a town of four hundred people — all the same to us.

It was never a sensible rule. Your hour happens on video, neither of you is told where the other lives, and nobody travels anywhere. The line was drawn around a city because that is where this started, not because it made any difference to the conversation.

If you are already a member, nothing changes except that the pool you are matched from gets bigger, which makes a Sunday more likely rather than less. A handful of people who registered from Hamilton, London, Stratford and Cambridge were sitting in limbo because of the old rule. They are now simply members.

Every time on this site is Eastern, which is the clock almost all of Ontario keeps. If you are out past Kenora on Central time, tell us and we will make sure you get the right hour.

We no longer ask for your date of birth

The form used to ask for the day you were born. It now asks how old you are, and that is all we keep.

The birth date was doing nothing. We stopped using age to match people on 13 September, so all it was still there for was checking you are 18 or over — and a birth date you type in yourself proves that no better than a number you type in yourself. What it did do was sit in our records next to your name, email, phone and neighbourhood, which is a set of details worth stealing. So we stopped holding it.

If you registered before today, we have deleted the date you gave us. You do not need to ask, and there is nothing for you to do.

Two strangers on Reddit told us this field was a reason not to sign up. They were right, and it was the only thing anyone objected to.

“Where in the GTA?” was a confusing question

Someone read it and thought we were asking where they wanted to meet in person. Fair enough — it is the sort of thing a question like that implies.

It now reads “whereabouts are you?” and says plainly underneath that your hour happens on video and you never travel to meet anyone. We ask at all for one reason: the beta is Toronto and the GTA for now, and that answer is how we decide which place to open next.

You can now offer more than one Sunday time

The Thursday question used to let you pick a single time. Now you can tick every time that could work, and you still only ever get one conversation.

This is the single biggest thing you can do to be matched. A handful of people each picking one different time produces no pairs at all, however well suited they are — which is exactly what happened in our first week, when people who were free said yes and still ended up with nobody.

We no longer ask which age you want to meet

Until now the form asked whether you wanted someone within ten years of your age, within twenty, older, or younger. That question is gone, and the answers already given are no longer used.

Two reasons. The first is that it was quietly the largest cause of people not being matched at all. In our first week, three of five people who said yes to a Sunday went unmatched, and age was the reason in two of those. One pair missed each other by a single year.

The second is that it was working against the point. You come here to meet someone you would not otherwise meet. A stranger twenty years older has more to say that you have not heard before than someone your own age does. Filtering that out made the pool smaller and the conversations more predictable.

Everyone here is 18 or over, and everyone has had a video call with us before being matched. Beyond that, age is not something we think we should be policing.

Gender preference stays exactly as it is

We considered removing this at the same time and decided not to. For some members it is a safety setting rather than a preference, and it is not ours to take away.

It works as it always has: whatever you choose is honoured, in both directions, and we never ask you to justify it. While we are small, a narrower choice may mean waiting longer for a match — but it is never set aside to fill a Sunday.

Toronto and the GTA, said properly

The terms always said Toronto or the Greater Toronto Area, but parts of the site said Toronto alone. If you are in Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Vaughan, Oakville, Pickering or anywhere else in the GTA, you are welcome. Conversations are on video, so you are never expected to be near the person you meet.

A calendar file with every match

The Friday email now carries a link that puts your conversation into whichever calendar you use, with a reminder thirty minutes before and the joining link inside the entry.

A Sunday morning slot

Someone asked for one, two others said it was the thing that made them sign up. Sundays now run at 11:00 a.m., 6:00 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.

Racism named in the guidelines, not implied

The rules said “slurs” and left it there. A member wrote on her form that she was worried about being matched with someone racist, and she had to ask because the page did not answer.

The guidelines now say plainly that racism and contempt for anyone’s race, ethnicity, religion, caste, nationality, immigration status, disability, gender or sexuality ends a membership — and that this covers being demeaned or talked down to, not only slurs. There is also a rule about not asking people where they are really from.

An honest answer about money

The site used to say OneHourOne would always be free and would never show advertising. The first half is still true and the second half was a promise we could not be certain of keeping, so we replaced it with what we actually know.

There are no ads today. If it ever grows enough that the costs are real, they would be covered by light sponsorship shown before or after a conversation — never during your hour, and never by selling your information. If that day comes, it will say so here first.