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. Polar takes a percentage plus a fixed amount on every transaction — at the time of writing, 5% plus $0.50, and slightly more on international cards. That is why the minimum gift here is what it is: on a $2 payment the fee would be roughly a third of the money. [TO BE CONFIRMED: Polar's fee schedule as of launch]
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. Polar runs identity checks on the person who receives the money. A real, identified human being is accountable for this, to a payment company and to a tax authority.
• 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: [TO BE CONFIRMED: contact email].

Payments are handled by Polar, as merchant of record

You are not handing your card to an anonymous website. Polar is the merchant of record for every payment on this site, which means Polar takes the payment, issues your receipt, and collects and forwards the sales tax or VAT your country charges. In practice:

• The charge on your statement comes from Polar — an established company with a real support desk — and not from a name you have never heard of. [TO BE CONFIRMED: the exact descriptor Polar puts on the card statement]
• Your card details never reach our servers. We never see them and we cannot store them.
• Your receipt arrives by email from Polar, immediately, whether or not we do anything.
• Refunds go back through Polar to the same card, and the tax goes back with them. See refunds.
• There is nothing recurring. One payment, one time, no subscription, no stored card.

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.