Chapter 44 · The Staff
The Free Anachronism Checker
The anachronism checker is the one piece of the staff you can use without an account. Paste a scene, say when it is set, and a few minutes later you get the same cited cards a project's fact-check produces. This chapter covers what the page asks for, what it refuses, what it keeps, and where it stops short of the real thing.
What it is
The checker lives at storskarvia.com/anachronism-checker. It runs the real fact-check: the same claim reading, the same Wikipedia and web search, the same judgement, and the same Skeptic arguing against every flag before it reaches you. The page is dressed as the Period Expert, because dates are what it is for, but it also reports plain factual errors it meets on the way.
It writes no prose and suggests no rewrites. You get findings, or one line saying nothing was found.
Running a check
- Paste the scene into Your passage. A counter beside the label shows 412 / 1,500 words as you type. Past 1,500 it turns red and the run button is disabled.
- Optionally, fill in When and where is it set?, for example Chicago, winter 1936. The next section explains why you usually should.
- Complete the human check if one appears below the fields.
- Press Check for anachronisms. The button changes to Starting the check… so a second press cannot start a second run.
Two other controls sit beside the button. Try the sample passage fills both fields with a scene from the sample chapter, set June 1962, outside New York, with a ZIP code, an eight-cent stamp, a Beatles single, a Boeing 727 and The Fugitive planted in it. It spends one of your checks like any other passage. See an example result opens a saved run on that same passage, which costs nothing and works when the checker is busy.
The setting box
Inside a project there is no setting field: the fact-check learns the year from your pages and the documents above them. The free checker sees one passage and nothing else, so a year you established three chapters earlier does not exist for it. The box is how you give that year back.
What you type, up to 80 characters on one line, is handed to every stage as the writer's own statement of when and where the story is set, and a year in it counts as the scene's year, exactly like a dateline in the passage. Leave it empty and the checker has only the passage to go on. If the passage never names a date either, a detail that is wrong only for your decade will pass.
While it works
Pressing the button takes you to a results page headed Checking your passage. The status line starts as Reading the passage for real-world claims. and changes to Checking 9 claims against sources. once they are found. A check usually takes one to four minutes. The page updates itself; with JavaScript off it refreshes every eight seconds instead.
The address of that page is the only key to your results. Anyone you send it to can read them until they are deleted, and the address cannot be guessed. Storskarvia keeps third-party tags off this page whatever your cookie answer says.
Reading the results
The heading gives the count, 3 findings, or No issues found, followed by a line such as 9 real-world claims checked in 640 words. Each card carries:
- a contradicted or misleading label and a confidence percentage, which reaches the high band only when two independent sources agree;
- your line, quoted;
- the explanation, with a bracketed note when it states a figure no source contained;
- up to three source links, or Pages the checker read (not cited) when the judge cited none of them.
Reading a Finding explains each part. The free cards have no Jump, Resolve or Dismiss: there is no document to jump into and nothing to keep a decision. A note above the cards may warn of weaker sourcing than usual, and a line beneath the summary says when the passage held more claims than one run checks.
A clean result says No claim was both contradicted by the evidence and upheld by the Skeptic. That is not a guarantee, and it means what When the Report Says Nothing describes: checked and unproblematic, or too thin to judge.
Limits, and the messages they show
Words are counted by the spaces between them. The allowance is three checks per connection, counted over 24 hours from the first one; there are also site-wide daily and monthly ceilings shared by every visitor.
| Message | What it means and what to do |
|---|---|
| That is too short to check. Paste at least a paragraph. | Under 20 words. Add the paragraphs around it. |
| That passage is 2,140 words. The free checker takes up to 1,500 at a time. | Split the scene, or run the whole chapter in a project. |
| Please complete the check that you are human, then run it again. | The human check was skipped or expired. Your text stays in the box. |
| You have used today's 3 free checks from this connection. | Everyone on a shared office, library or home address draws on the same three, and on IPv6 the whole /64 counts as one connection. Wait out the 24 hours or use an account. |
| The free checker has reached today's limit. or this month's limit | The site-wide ceiling, not yours. Try tomorrow, or next month. |
| The free checker is busy with other passages right now. | A few checks run at once. Try again in a minute, or read the example result meanwhile. |
| The check did not finish | The page says why: it took too long, there was more to check than one free run covers, the search sources were not answering, or something broke on our side. Each of those usually gives the check back, up to three times a day. One reason never does: a passage with nothing real-world in it, which ends Nothing was checked, so try a passage with real-world detail in it. |
| These results are gone | More than 24 hours have passed, or the link was mistyped. Run the passage again. |
Refused attempts cost nothing. An error message also leaves your passage in the box, so fixing it never means pasting again.
What is kept, and for how long
- Your passage is held in memory while the check runs and is never written to the database.
- The results, which quote the lines they flag, are deleted 24 hours after the check ran. No address is stored with them.
- The allowance is a counter keyed by a scrambled form of your address, useless without the app's secret. One exception: a request refused because that connection had used its three checks is logged with its address as an abuse signal, as the privacy policy says.
- Outside Storskarvia, the passage is read by DeepSeek's model through its API, and short queries built from it go to Wikipedia and web search. Storskarvia never trains on your writing, but DeepSeek's terms make no such promise, so paste nothing you would not send there.
Your Data and Your Privacy in Part IX sets this beside what a project keeps.
How it differs from a check in a project
| Free checker | Fact-check in a project | |
|---|---|---|
| Account | None | Required |
| Length | 1,500 words | A whole document, charged per 10,000 words |
| Claims per run | At most 40 | At most 150 |
| Where the date comes from | The setting box and the passage | The pages, and up to 50 documents above them in the binder |
| Cost | Free, three a day per connection | The monthly allowance |
| Findings | Read-only, deleted after 24 hours | Kept in the Facts tab with Jump, Resolve and Dismiss |
| Continuity | None | The continuity editor, on request |
Signed in or not, the free checker behaves the same: it does not touch your allowance, and its results never land in a project. To keep a finding, check the chapter in the studio, as Running a Fact-Check describes. What the free plan includes is in Plans and Allowances.
Updated 2026-10-06 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?