Surviving

What spends a year

Three things, and nothing else.

• A visit delivered — one year. A visitor follows your entry on the board through /go/{slug} and lands on your URL.
• Upkeep — ten years a day, charged at the tick whether or not anybody visited.
• An Arena stake — 100 years, once, when a duel you are in starts. Only if you took the field yourself; see The Arena.

Years are minted and burned, never moved. Nothing transfers a year between listings — there are no pots and nothing to win. The Arena is not an exception to that rule: both sides burn the same stake at the same moment, the winner is not refunded, the loser pays no more, and judging the duel writes nothing to anybody's balance. When somebody is beheaded, their rank passes upward and their years do not go anywhere at all.

Which visits burn

A gate here only ever decides whether the visit burns. Every visitor is redirected either way — a refused visit still reaches your site.

A visit burns only when all of these hold:

1. It is a real top-level browser navigation from a page of ours, in headers page script cannot forge, from a client that does not announce itself as a bot.
2. It carries the signed single-use token the board minted into that link when it rendered. Tokens last ten minutes and cannot be spent twice.
3. It did not come from a datacenter address.
4. It is the first visit to this listing from this visitor today. A visitor is a one-way digest of a daily-rotating salt, the listing, the address and the user agent — it cannot be reversed and cannot be linked across days, and no address or agent is ever stored.
5. The listing is under its daily cap, above zero, off Holy Ground, and not frozen.

The daily cap

A listing burns at most 200 years a day, whatever the traffic. Visits past the cap still deliver — they simply cost nothing.

It is the guarantee that does not depend on detecting anything: a 5,000-year listing takes at least 25 days to drain, and by day one its owner has been mailed. That is what turns clicking a rival to death from an afternoon's work into weeks of sustained attack against somebody who has been watching it happen.

Nobody can change it — including you. It is the board's number, not a dial on your dashboard, and that is not a restriction so much as the only setting under which a cap means anything. Because a visit over the cap is still delivered, a listing that could set its own cap to 1 would take every visit on the board for a year a day; and because rank is years remaining and nothing else, it would sit at the top while the listing beneath it paid a hundred times as much for the same place. The cap can bound an attack or it can be a budget. It cannot be both, and bounding the attack is the one worth having.

The one spend control that is yours is lifting a freeze — safe to leave with you precisely because it only ever makes your own listing burn faster. Nothing you can reach makes a visit cost less.

Holy Ground

For the first 24 hours after entering, a visit cannot take your balance below one year. Upkeep still applies at the tick.

The Tick

The daily sweep runs at 12:00 UTC and is the only moment anybody is beheaded. In one pass it charges every living listing its upkeep, beheads everyone the charge left at or below zero, and takes the never-visited off the board.

Because beheading only happens there, no burst can kill anything and every death has a full day of warning behind it. The board's header carries the countdown to the next tick and how many immortals are standing at zero in front of it, computed from the database clock.

The Deathwatch on the board lists everyone with under a day of runway, soonest first. Runway is years ÷ (visits charged in the last 24 hours + upkeep) and nothing else.

Alerts go out by mail on the way down, and again when the blade falls.

The Vigil

Opening your own listing's page mints 5 years — half a day's upkeep — once per tick-day. It is owner-only, verified-only and board-only, and it never compounds: attending on consecutive days is worth exactly the same each time, forever.

Attendance halves the clock on a quiet listing and buys no altitude. Half rather than all of it, deliberately: a Vigil worth a full day's upkeep would make a listing nobody clicks immortal for free, and nothing here is free forever. A listing nobody visits still runs down, and still comes off the board under the rule below.

Referrals

Every listing has a share link — /via/{slug} — shown on your dashboard and on your own listing's page, and to nobody else. It carries no token and nothing that expires: it works written on a sticker.

A first-time visitor you bring to the board earns the listing one year. Flat: the first arrival of the day and the hundredth are worth exactly the same, and nothing anywhere compounds. Years are minted here as everywhere else — nothing is taken from anybody.

Every arrival reaches the board. A gate only ever decides whether it earns, and an arrival earns only when all of these hold:

1. It is a real top-level browser navigation, in headers page script cannot forge, from a client that does not announce itself as a bot.
2. It did not start on our own board. A shared link is by definition traffic brought from somewhere else; from a post, a bookmark, an address bar or a QR code are all the point.
3. It did not come from a datacenter address.
4. It is the first arrival through this listing's link from this visitor today. A visitor is the same one-way digest of a daily-rotating salt the tap uses, kept apart from it, so an arrival and a visit through the board by the same person never consume each other's day.
5. The listing is standing, verified and on the board. The Mists, the fallen and the hidden earn nothing.

A listing takes at most 100 years a day from referrals, counted tick to tick, whatever the traffic. Arrivals past that ceiling still reach the board; they simply earn nothing.

Summons

The other share link, and the other economy: /?ref={slug}, also on your dashboard. A referral is paid for traffic — one year, every time, forever. A summons is paid for a lister.

Bring somebody who enters a domain of their own and proves it, and they start with 50 extra years while your listing earns 25. Once per entry, at the moment that entry becomes real, and never again for the same one. Both sides are minted, as everywhere else — the newcomer's welcome does not come out of your balance and yours does not come out of theirs.

Paid at the proof rather than at the submit, because a submission costs nothing and a proof costs a domain. Either door counts: the TXT record or a completed pack.

Three things it will not pay for, all checked when the years are minted:

• A listing that shares an owner or a registrable domain with the entry it summoned. Bringing yourself is not bringing anyone.
• A summoner that is not standing on the board.
• More than 50 years a day to any one listing — two summons, counted tick to tick.

The link works for the length of a visit, not a month. It carries the slug in the address bar and nothing else: we store nothing on the visitor's device to stretch that window, which is the same reason there is no consent banner anywhere on this site. Somebody who follows your link and enters in that sitting is counted; somebody who bookmarks the board and comes back next week arrives as a stranger.

Under siege

When an hour's burn runs past five times that listing's own median busy hour over the previous week — and never below a floor of 20 visits an hour, so a first popular hour does not read as an attack — burning is frozen for six hours and the listing shows an under siege badge on the board and on its own page.

Visits keep delivering while frozen; they stop counting. The lister can lift the freeze early from the dashboard, because it is their spend. Nobody else can.

The failure direction is deliberate: a wrong freeze costs the lister some traffic for six hours and costs an attacker everything they were spending.

Three ways off the board that are not death

All three keep your years, and /go/{slug} keeps working through all three. Upkeep is still charged while a listing is off the board, though, so a hold left alone ends the same way an empty balance does. Your dashboard names the hold and the way out of it, whichever one it is.

• Nobody ever visited it. A verified listing that has stood 48 hours without a single visit comes off the board at the tick, and the tick mails you when it does. The first visit that burns puts it straight back. A listing that has ever bought a pack is never taken this way, whatever its count — a zero reads as "nobody wants this", which is true of a spam run and false of a paid listing on a quiet board.
• Held in a wave. A run of listings sharing a title or description inside an hour is held off the board at submit — see Entering. Proving the domain lifts it.
• Reported. Three distinct verified listers reporting an entry takes it off the board, and it stays off — a moderation hold is cleared by neither a visit nor a DNS record. Reporting requires a verified standing listing of your own, which is what makes three reports expensive.

Beheading, and coming back

At the tick, a balance at or below zero is struck: the listing is crossed out, moved to The Fallen with the day it fell, and off the board. The mail says so, with a link back.

Buying a pack revives a beheaded listing into the open Gathering along with the years. The fallen row stays where it is — the graveyard records what happened rather than who is currently dead — and a revival can still be refused if somebody else claimed the domain while you were down. A listing that was already reported off the board rises un-beheaded and still held: a pack buys years, never a moderation decision.