Rules · StanClash

The short version

You pick a fandom and give money. Your money is added to that fandom's pool for the current week. The fandom with the largest pool when the week ends is crowned, takes the Throne on the front page for the following week, and keeps a permanent crown in the Hall of Fame. That is the entire mechanic. There is no cash payout of any kind, and nothing is decided by chance.

How scoring works

Rank is a sum. Your gift is added to your fandom's pool for the week you paid in, and the ranking is those pools in order — no multipliers, no bonus for going early, no hidden weighting, no way to buy a boost that other people cannot buy.

What counts is the amount before sales tax:

Your $5 counts as $5, wherever you live. Sales tax is collected by Polar and goes to your government — it never reaches the board and it never buys rank. Everyone's money is worth the same here.

Sales tax runs from nothing at all in some places to 27% in others. If the board counted the total charged to your card, a fan in Hungary would buy less rank than a fan in Delaware for exactly the same generosity, and the ranking would be a map of tax regimes instead of a map of fandom passion. So the number that moves the board is the amount after any discount and before tax. The tax you pay is collected by our payment processor and forwarded to your government; we never see it and it never touches the score.

Only two things can make the scored amount smaller than what you paid, and both are described below: the rolling 24-hour limit, and a refund. Nothing else changes it, in either direction, ever.

No dollar is ever lost

This is the promise the whole site is built on. This is not an auction. You are never outbid, and your money never stops counting for the fandom you gave it to.

If your fandom is second, or fourth, or last, every dollar you gave is still in its pool, still on the board, and still counted when the week closes. There is no mechanic anywhere on this site that moves a contribution away from the fandom it was given to, or that discounts it for arriving on the losing side. A gift on Monday counts exactly as much as the same gift on Sunday night.

Only two things remove money from a live pool: a refund, and the weekly reset. When a week ends, every pool goes back to zero for the new week — and the week that just finished is kept forever, exactly as it finished, in the Hall of Fame.

The week

A week runs from Monday 00:00 UTC to the following Monday 00:00 UTC. The countdown on the board is counting down to Sunday 23:59:59 UTC.
A gift belongs to the week in which the payment completed, not the week you opened the checkout page in.
At close, the standings are copied and frozen, the crown is awarded, the Throne changes over, and every pool resets to zero.
A week in which nobody contributed anything closes with no crown at all. We do not hand the crown to whichever fandom happens to sort first.

Limits on what you can give

Minimum gift: $3. Below that, the payment fee eats most of it.
Maximum single gift: $50.
Rolling limit: $50 in any 24 hours. It is a rolling window, not a calendar day, so it cannot be doubled by paying twice either side of midnight.

About that limit, honestly

The limit is keyed to the email address you use at checkout, and to the customer record our payment processor creates from it. Here is what that does and does not achieve, because you should hear it from us rather than discover it:

It does stop the accidental spiral — the tap, tap, tap at 2am that you regret at 9am. That is the single most common reason anyone asks for money back.
It does stop one very large gift from flattening a week for everyone else. A thousand people giving $3 is a livelier board than one person deciding the outcome.
It does not stop someone determined to work around it with a second email address, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Our payment processor gives us no card identifier whatsoever, so this limit cannot be enforced per card, and you will not find us claiming that it is.

Because it is harm reduction rather than a wall, it is not the only protection here: there is also the 16+ requirement, the 72-hour no-questions refund, and daily monitoring of how many people ask their bank to reverse a payment.

If a payment does land that pushes you past the limit — two tabs open, or a checkout page left sitting for an hour — the part that fits under the limit is scored and the rest is money that bought no rank. We refund that part. We do not keep it, and you do not have to ask.

Refunds

Within 72 hours of your payment, we will refund it. No questions, no reason required, no argument. The details of how are on the refunds page.

If something is wrong, email us before you open a dispute with your bank. We will get your money back to you faster than a dispute will, and a dispute costs us a fixed fee and counts against the whole site with our payment processor. Enough of them and there is no site left for anybody. We would much rather refund you.

When the whistle blows

When the whistle blows, the result is final. Refunds after a season closes are honored in money — you get your money back — but not in the record. The week that already happened stays the way it happened.

While a week is live, a refund lowers that week's pool immediately. Live means live. Once a week has closed, its result is frozen: the crown, the final pools and the standings are stored as a snapshot and are never recomputed.

The reason is not convenience. If we recomputed closed weeks, a fandom could be un-crowned days after celebrating, the Hall of Fame would quietly rewrite itself, and every screenshot of that victory card would stop matching the site. For a scoreboard whose only asset is that it does not lie, a record that can change afterwards is worse than a record that is imperfect. So you get your money back, and the week stays as it happened.

You must be 16 or older

You confirm your age at checkout, and giving money when you are under 16 is not allowed here. If you are under 16: don't. This is money that does not come back as anything except a number on a screen.

If a parent or guardian tells us their child paid, we refund it — whatever the 72-hour window says, and without requiring proof that would be unreasonable to produce. Write to us and say so.

Nicknames are reviewed before they appear

A nickname is optional. If you give one, it is checked before it can appear anywhere public — display here is opt-in, not opt-out, because a live feed of unchecked text on a site built to be screenshotted into fandom arguments is a slur waiting to happen.

2–20 characters: letters, digits, spaces, underscore, dot and hyphen.
Automated checks run first. Text is normalised before it is examined, so invisible characters, lookalike glyphs and digits standing in for letters do not get anything past the filter.
Impersonation is refused: nothing that reads as staff, official, a moderator, or as this site itself.
Anything the automated check is unsure about waits for a human instead of being thrown away. Filters trip over non-English names constantly, and being unsure is not the same as being guilty.
Until a nickname is approved, your gift appears as “a fan”. The amount and the country still show, and the money still counts in full. The name is a bonus, never a requirement.
We can remove or hide an approved nickname later if it turns out to be a problem, without touching the money it was attached to.

The same review applies to the Throne message. That one is never approved automatically by anything: it sits on the front page for a week, so a human reads it first, every time.

What the crowned fandom actually gets

The Throne. The front page of this site for the whole following week, in that fandom's colours, with its name at the top and a message from its top contributor.
A permanent crown in the Hall of Fame, with the final table of that week frozen beside it, plus a victory card built for sharing.
A permanent title for the top contributor of the crowned fandom.
Founder marks. The first 100 people to ever give to a fandom keep a Founder mark on that fandom's page, permanently. That is all-time, not per week.
Bragging rights, which are the actual point of the whole exercise.

To be completely unambiguous about what this is not:

There is no cash payout, no gift card, no merchandise and nothing else of monetary value. What you get is a number moving in public and status inside this site.
There is no element of chance anywhere: no draw, no random selection, no surprise multiplier. The ranking is arithmetic on a public sum, visible all week.
A contribution is not an investment, not a donation to a charity, not tax-deductible, and no part of it reaches an artist, a group, a label or a fan project.

What we will never do

Never add money to this board that was not really paid. The operator's own seed money is on the board labelled seed, in the live feed and as its own line on the stats page. There are no fake contributors and no invented totals.
Never round a total up. Public totals are floored to the dollar, so the number you see is never larger than the money we actually hold.
Never quietly keep money that bought no rank.
Never use a photograph or logo of any artist or group. Fandom names and colours are used referentially and nothing here implies any affiliation.

Changes to these rules

If we change these rules, the change applies from then onwards. A week that has already closed is never re-scored under new rules, and the record of it never changes. If a change is significant, it will be visible on the front page rather than slipped in quietly here.

Questions

Write to [TO BE CONFIRMED: contact email]. Also worth reading: refunds, privacy, terms and who runs this and where the money goes.