The Settings You Only Find by Accident
Last week's article was about one control almost nobody had found: the toggle that makes you invisible in the friends list. Writing it turned up something the article did not have room for, which is that the invisible toggle is not unusual. NuPalz has a small pile of real, working, reachable controls that are not in any list, and a few of them are things people ask for regularly. Here they are, every one traced from the thing you click to the thing it changes.
The Distinction That Matters Most
Before the list, the thing that makes it useful. These settings fall into two groups and the difference is not cosmetic.
Some are stored in your browser. They are a note your own computer keeps, they take effect instantly, and they do not travel. New laptop, different browser, cleared cache and they are gone — back to the default, with nothing lost but the preference. Nobody else can see them because nobody else has them.
Some are stored on your account. Those follow you everywhere and they change what the server does. That is a genuinely different kind of setting, and it is the group worth being certain about.
How to tell, without taking our word for it
Our cookie policy lists every key NuPalz keeps in your browser, with what each one is for. If a preference is on that page, it lives on your machine. It is an independent record and it is a better answer than anything a help article can tell you.
Stored in Your Browser
The space bar one is our favourite and the least discoverable, because the only place it is written down is in the small print under an unrelated switch in settings. It is also carefully built: it does nothing while you are typing in a box and nothing while a window is open over the top, so it cannot fire while you are in the middle of something.
The honest consequence of a browser setting
None of the six above will be waiting for you on a different device, and none of them is a privacy control. They change what you see. That is the whole scope of them, and it is worth knowing before you assume a preference travelled with you.
Stored on Your Account
Two, and they behave completely differently from everything above, because the server is the one enforcing them.
The marketing email switch, in the Email Preferences section of dashboard settings. Turning it off writes a flag to your account, and that flag is checked in every place that would otherwise send you something promotional — including the reminder about an unfinished checkout, which is the one people are usually reacting to when they go looking for this switch. We traced it end to end for this article: the control, the field, and each place that reads it before sending. Transactional mail is a separate thing and it is not affected.
The invisible toggle, in the sidebar, which is last week's article and is not going to be re-explained here. The short version is that it is the other setting on this page whose effect is enforced by the server rather than drawn by your browser, which is exactly why it took a server change to make it behave.
Why we say “traced” rather than “private”
Last week's piece shipped alongside a fix, because a control can look right in the interface while the server never actually acts on it. So the rule we now hold ourselves to is that no setting gets described here as changing what other people see unless the suppression was followed all the way into the server code. The six in the first list make no such claim. The two in this one were checked.
What Is Deliberately Not on This List
Two omissions worth naming, so you know they are omissions rather than oversights.
Blocking is not here. It is a real control with real consequences on both sides, and a one-line summary of it would be worse than no summary at all. It has its own article: what blocking does, and what it doesn't.
Nothing about what gets scanned or moderated is here either, and that is a permanent policy rather than a gap. The reasoning is set out in why messages are not encrypted, and publishing the mechanics would defeat the thing they exist for.
Why This List Rots
A closing note that is really about how to read any article like this one.
Every entry above was checked against the current code the morning this published: the element you click, the handler it calls, and the place the value ends up. That is the only reason to trust a list like this, and it is also the reason it will go stale. Interfaces move. If something here does not match what you see, the interface is right and we are wrong, and we would rather hear about it than not.
If you like this sort of thing, hidden features most trainers miss is the older version of the same hunt, and the four Gemz boosts is what happens when the same treatment is applied to something you can actually spend money on.