Submit
/enter takes three things and no account:
- Link — where the tap sends visitors. The URL as you submit it, path and all. Its host is what the board shows.
- Title — up to 80 characters.
- Description — up to 200 characters, optional.
Submitting is free and instant. Signing in first is optional and only decides whether the listing appears in your dashboard, where your standing, your share links and the buy panel live.
The checks at submit
Five checks run server-side against what you already handed over. None of them asks you for anything, and none of them is a review queue.
| Check | What it stops |
|---|---|
| Reserved names | .example, .test, .invalid, .localhost, and anything under example.com / .net / .org |
| The page answers | The URL must resolve and return 200 with a non-empty <title> |
| One live entry per registrable domain | Forty-four subdomains are one listing, not forty-four. A beheaded listing releases its domain, so a fallen host can be entered again from scratch |
| Domain age | A registration younger than 24 hours, checked over RDAP |
| Near-duplicate waves | A run of listings sharing a title or description inside an hour is held, not refused |
The first four come straight back on the form saying which one it was.
The fifth is the odd one, and deliberately: a wave is held rather than refused, because the same title arriving five times in an hour is evidence about a run and never proof about any one entry in it. A held entry exists, keeps everything, and simply does not appear on the board — and proving the domain lifts the hold. That is the whole of the appeal, and it needs nobody: a TXT record on each of five real domains is the cost a scripted run cannot pay, and the one listing caught by having written the same title as a stranger walks out on its own. Your dashboard says so while it is held.
A sixth check may run in front of those, depending on how this instance is configured: a proof-of-work test your browser solves while you fill the form in. It sets no cookie, stores nothing, and builds no profile of you — which is why there is no consent banner in front of it — and most visitors never see more than a checkbox. If it cannot tell you from a bot, the form says so and a reload gets you a fresh one. When the service behind it is unreachable, submissions carry on regardless: an outage there closes nothing.
On the board at once
A submission that clears the checks is on the board immediately, holding an entry grant of 250 years — twenty-five days of upkeep, and nothing else. It ranks and burns like any listing, and its row is marked unproven until somebody proves the domain.
Proving it is worth 150 more years, and it is the key to everything else that mints: the Vigil, referrals, summons, the survival grant when a Gathering closes, and the Arena. An unproven listing can stand and it can fall; what it can never do is earn its way up. That is the invariant the ladder rests on: a scripted run can put rows on the board, and upkeep alone beheads every one of them inside a month.
Two doors lead to the proof, and either one works.
Door one: the TXT record
Publish the record your entry page shows you:
Then hit Check now. The value is derived from the entry and its domain, so it is the same on every page load: it never expires, nothing is issued, and re-checking after a slow DNS provider catches up is always safe.
The moment the record is seen, 150 years are minted and the row loses its mark.
Door two: buy a pack
A completed pack checkout verifies the listing too. Payment is identity, and checkout collects a business tax ID anyway — see Packs and billing. The verification grant is minted on this path as well, alongside the years you bought.
This door is your own listing's, and nobody else's. A pack proves the domain only when the listing has no account behind it yet — the anonymous submit, where the payment is also what says whose it is — or when the account paying is the one that already holds it. Anybody may still buy years for an unproven listing; what a stranger's card cannot do is prove a domain they do not hold. Otherwise entering somebody else's domain and paying five euros would be the whole ladder, bought.
Somebody else entered your domain
It is allowed, and it has to be: entry is free, instant and needs no account, so nothing at submit asks whether the person typing a URL controls the host in it. The proof is that check. A stranger's entry of your domain is on the board, marked unproven, on its entry grant — and it stays that way, because the TXT record has to be published in your zone and a pack cannot buy past it either. Left alone, upkeep beheads it inside a month.
What it can do is hold the slot. One live entry per registrable domain is the rule, so while theirs stands, your own submission is refused. The way out depends on one thing:
- They submitted without an account — the ordinary case, because that is the ordinary way to submit. The listing belongs to nobody. Publish the record it shows you, sign in, and press Check now: the same act that proves the domain says whose it is — the 150 years land on it, and the listing becomes yours, with the dashboard, the Vigil and the Arena that come with it.
- They submitted with an account. Then it cannot be taken self-serve, and deliberately: a claim only ever fills a hole, it never transfers, because a domain changing hands is a conversation with a human rather than a button. Write to mail@haukejung.de.
In that second case, do not publish the TXT record on their listing. It would prove their entry of your domain and hand them the listing, years and all. The refusal on the submit form says so where it can catch you.
Reporting does not help here either, and it is worth knowing why: three reports take a listing off the board, which is not the same as taking it out of existence. It keeps its row, and its row keeps your domain's slot. Mail is the route.
After you appear
- Your listing ranks by years remaining, and burns one year per visit delivered plus ten a day in upkeep.
- Holy Ground covers your first 24 hours: visits cannot take your balance below one year.
- A listing that stands seven days without a single visit comes off the board until one lands. It keeps its years,
/go/{slug}keeps working, and the first visit that burns puts it back.
Everything after that is Surviving.