About this site
Blank Cipher publishes one thing: a five-step beginner's course, for readers in Australia, on starting an account-based free-to-play desktop game. There is nothing else here and nothing else planned.
Who publishes it
Blank Cipher is published by GALLARDO TRADE s.r.o., a company registered in the Czech Republic.
GALLARDO TRADE s.r.o.
Rybná 716/24, Staré Město, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic
Company registration: 03544371
info@blankcipher.online
Writing is attributed to the GALLARDO TRADE s.r.o. editorial team. We do not print author names, biographies, photographs or job titles, because a course of this kind does not need them and inventing them would be dishonest. There are no instructors, no sign-ups and no certificates; this is a workbook you read, not a programme you join.
Editorial method: how the course was built
The structure came first. We wrote down the questions a person asks, in the order they actually ask them, from "what is the catch" through to "what happens if a purchase goes wrong". That gave five groups, and each group became a step. Nothing was added because it filled a page, and nothing was split in two to make the course look longer.
Each step then had to pass three tests before publication. It had to be completable with no money spent. It had to be true of the category as a whole rather than of one product's interface, so that it stays accurate when a game is updated. And it had to end in a checklist a reader could carry out alone, without asking us anything, because there is no support service behind this site.
Sources, by step:
| Step | Relies on |
|---|---|
| 1 | Publishers' own descriptions of their business models, and the vendor statement for the example title. No figures are asserted. |
| 2 | Tools already present on Windows and Linux desktops, and requirements as published by publishers and stores on their current pages. |
| 3 | The structure of publishers' own terms, privacy, refund and conduct documents; the ACCC on consumer guarantees; the OAIC on privacy; Scamwatch on deceptive approaches. |
| 4 | General, platform-level setup practice, plus the Australian Cyber Security Centre on updates and account security. |
| 5 | The Australian Classification Board's published decisions and explanations; the eSafety Commissioner on online safety; the ACCC on resolving purchase problems. |
Where a public body publishes on a subject, we link to that body rather than restating it, and we do not copy figures, ratings or thresholds onto this site where they could go out of date. Where a vendor has not stated something, the course says so instead of filling the gap with an estimate. There are no benchmarks, test results, awards or statistics anywhere on this site, because we have not conducted any and would not pass off somebody else's as ours.
How often it is reviewed
The whole course is reviewed at least twice a year, and sooner whenever something it depends on visibly changes — a vendor restating what an offer covers, or a public body moving a page we link to. Each review checks every external link, the vendor statements we rely on, and whether any step has drifted towards describing one product's interface instead of the category.
The date of the most recent review is printed in the footer of every page, including this one. Legal pages carry their own effective date, updated when they are revised.
Our commercial relationships, stated plainly
This matters more than anything else on the page, so it is not buried. The one product named in this course, Crossout, is a product we have a commercial relationship with. We are paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates its link when a reader follows that link and goes on to register and confirm their email address. That is the only way this site earns anything.
What that relationship does not do is decide the content. The checks in each step are the checks we would publish anyway; several of them — the operating-system test in Step 2, the arithmetic in Step 5 — can end with a reader deciding not to install anything, and they are in the course for that reason. No affiliate link appears inside a checklist, and Step 5, the step about money, carries none at all.
We are not affiliated with the publisher of any game named here, we are not an authorised reseller or partner of any of them, and nobody has endorsed, reviewed or sponsored this site. The full arrangement, including exactly where the links appear, is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
What this site does not do
It collects nothing. There is no form, no sign-up, no newsletter, no account, no progress tracking and no chat. It sets no cookies and uses no analytics, no advertising tags and no third-party scripts or fonts; every page loads from this domain and makes no request to any other server. The Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy set that out in detail.
It is also not a news publication, not a review site, not an official or authorised source for any game, and not a download page. It does not scan your computer, cannot see your device or your account, and never tells you that something is wrong with either.
If you want to get in touch, the Contact page has a plain email address and nothing else.