This is a scoreboard, and we are not going to dress it up

What this is

Ten fandoms, one public pool each, one week at a time. Money is the score. Whoever holds the largest pool on Sunday night takes the Throne on the front page for the following week and keeps a permanent crown in the Hall of Fame. Pools reset on Monday and the argument starts again.

There is no cash payout and no element of chance. What you are paying for is a number moving in public and status inside this site. The full mechanic, including every limit, is on the rules page.

And the mechanic that matters most: no dollar is ever lost. This is not an auction. If your fandom ends the week in fourth place, every cent you gave is still in its pool and still counted. Nobody is ever outbid here.

Where your money goes

No hedging. In this order:

1. The payment processor's cut. Stripe takes a percentage plus a fixed amount on every transaction. At the time of writing that is 1.5% + €0.25 for cards issued inside the EEA and 3.15% + €0.25 for cards issued outside it, plus 2% whenever a currency has to be converted — which is most payments here, because this board counts in dollars and the account behind it settles in euros.
   The fixed quarter of a euro is what sets the floor. On a $5 gift the whole cut lands near a tenth; on a $2 one it would be closer to a fifth, because the fixed part does not get smaller when the gift does. That is the entire reason the minimum here is $3 and not $1.
2. Running the site. Domain, hosting, database, the unglamorous monthly bills.
3. The person who built it. Whatever is left over is income. That is the business model, in full, with nothing under it.

None of your money goes to an artist, a group, an agency, a label, a fan project or a charity. No artist's budget improves because you gave $5 here. If what you want is to support an artist, buying their music or a ticket does that and this does not — we would rather say so out loud than have you work it out afterwards and feel tricked.

What you are buying is the scoreboard: the ranking, the live feed, the crown, the record. If that is worth $5 to you, that is a fair trade and we are glad to have you. If it is not, the board is free to watch and always will be.

Who runs this

You will only ever see one name here: the Board Keeper. It is a pseudonym, and it is a fixed one — the same name and the same face, every post, every reply, every week, including the weeks something goes wrong. There is no rotating cast and no anonymous void behind the counter. What destroys trust is not a pseudonym; it is nobody being there at all.

Why a pseudonym: this site's job is to stand in the middle of arguments between fandoms that get extremely personal, extremely fast. A referee's real name and home town attached to that chair invites harassment aimed at a household rather than at a website.

What the pseudonym does not mean:

• It is not anonymity from the law. Stripe runs identity checks before this account could take a single payment: a real, identified human being — name, date of birth and address on file — is on the other side of every charge. What the pseudonym keeps from you is which name. It keeps it from nobody holding the documents.
• It is not licence to fudge the numbers. Trust here is not carried by a name. It is carried by things you can check without trusting anyone: the stats page, refunds that actually happen, and a charge on your statement from an established company.

Contact goes to a real inbox that a human reads: stanclash.app@gmail.com.

Payments are processed by Stripe

Being precise about this, because it decides who you are dealing with: Stripe processes the payment, and StanClash is the seller. Stripe is not standing between us as the merchant of record. You are buying from this site, and the obligations that come with that — the refund, the receipt, any sales tax owed — are ours, not Stripe's. In practice:

• The charge on your statement reads STANCLASH.LOL, which is this site's address, so you can recognise it weeks later without having to guess.
• Your card details never reach our servers. We never see them and we cannot store them.
• Your receipt comes from Stripe, immediately, whether or not we do anything.
• Refunds go back through Stripe to the same card. See refunds.
• There is nothing recurring. One payment, one time, no subscription, no stored card.

What this means for tax, said plainly rather than left implied: the price you see is what is charged, and any sales tax owed on it is paid out of that, by us. It is not added on top of your total and it is not something you are being asked to carry.

The board opened at zero, plus our own seed money

Before the first fan arrived, the operator put a small amount of their own money on the board so the mechanic could be seen working. It is labelled seed everywhere it appears: in the live feed, in the database, and as its own line on the stats page. It is exempt from the daily limit because it is not a fan's money, and it is labelled so that nobody has to take our word for anything.

The line we will not cross: not one dollar on this board that was not really paid. No invented contributors, no inflated totals, no rounding up, not even in a screenshot. Fandoms are the most relentless investigators on the internet and they would find it eventually — but that is not the reason. The reason is that a scoreboard that lies is worth nothing, to us or to anyone looking at it.

What people are saying

Protections, since we are asking for money

• 16+ only, confirmed at checkout.
• A no-questions refund for 72 hours after any payment.
• A rolling daily limit on how much one person can give, described honestly — including what it cannot do — on the rules page.
• No accounts and no stored email addresses. See privacy.
• Nothing anyone types appears in public until it has passed a review.

If this does not work

It might not. Plenty of things do not. If we decide to shut the site down, we will say so on this page rather than letting it rot, stop taking payments that day, and honour every refund still inside the 72-hour window. The record of the weeks that already happened is a snapshot; taking it offline would be the last thing to go, not the first.