Private decks: study your own material without publishing it
October 14, 2026
Every deck on Braineos used to be public the moment you made it. That's fine for a deck you want remixed and voted on, but it's the wrong default for a cram sheet of your own medical terminology, or a vocabulary list you haven't double-checked yet. Private decks fix that.
What changes
Mark a deck private (a premium feature) and it drops out of search, discovery, and anyone else's browsing -- only you can see it. Un-marking it is always allowed, even if your premium has since lapsed; the restriction is only on turning privacy on without premium, never on keeping an already-private deck private or making it public again.
Challenges still work
Privacy didn't mean "can't be shared" -- it meant "not publicly listed." If you challenge a mutual follow to a flashcard match on a private deck, they can see and study that exact deck for the life of the challenge (pending or completed -- a challenge you cancelled doesn't leave the door open). No separate sharing step, no making the deck public just to run a challenge.
What stays hidden even from you
If you remix (copy) a deck and the original later goes private, your copy stays exactly as it was -- remixing doesn't link decks live, it clones them. What does change is the "remixed from" credit on your copy's page: it quietly disappears rather than naming a deck you can no longer see, so your copy never leaks the name or owner of something that's now private.
And private decks are invisible to one more thing you'll never see directly: the hidden quality scoring that runs behind the scenes on public decks (more on that in another post). A private deck's cards are never sent anywhere for review -- not scored, not read by anything but you.