Terms of use

1. Who you are dealing with

StanClash is operated by [TO BE CONFIRMED: legal entity and registered address] at [TO BE CONFIRMED: final domain]. Contact: [TO BE CONFIRMED: contact email].

Payments are taken by Polar as merchant of record. For the payment itself, your counterparty is Polar, and Polar's own terms and privacy policy apply to it in addition to these terms. We never see or hold your card details.

2. What you are actually paying for

When you contribute, you get exactly this:

• Your contribution recorded against the fandom you chose, in the week you paid in.
• That fandom's public total on this site increases by the scored amount.
• A display name in public lists, if you supplied a nickname and it passed review (see clause 7).
• A Founder mark on that fandom, if you were early enough. See the rules.

And explicitly not:

• No cash payout, no gift card, no merchandise, nothing else of monetary value of any kind, and no element of chance anywhere in the mechanic.
• No investment, no share of revenue, no ownership of anything, no charitable donation, and nothing tax-deductible.
• No promise that the site keeps running, that a feature keeps existing, or that any particular outcome happens in the ranking.
• No support of any artist, group, agency or label. See the non-affiliation statement in clause 9.

3. Who may use this

• You must be 16 or older to contribute, and you confirm that at checkout.
• If the law where you live sets a higher age for this kind of payment, that law applies to you instead.
• You must be entitled to use the payment method you use. Using someone else's card, including a family member's, is not allowed.
• Watching the board requires nothing at all: no account, no age check, no cookie banner.

4. Limits, and our right to refuse

• Minimum contribution $3; maximum single contribution $50.
• A rolling limit of $50 per person per 24 hours, keyed to the email address used at checkout. The rules page explains plainly what that limit does and does not prevent.
• Money that arrives above the limit is scored only up to the limit; the remainder bought no rank and is refunded to you without you asking.
• We may refuse, reverse or refund any contribution, and we may stop displaying any nickname, at our discretion. If we refuse your money, you get all of it back.

5. Refunds

Full policy: refunds. In short: any contribution can be refunded within 72 hours, no questions asked. After that window, refunds are at our discretion, and we always refund a payment made by someone under 16 when a parent or guardian tells us about it.

Please contact us before opening a dispute with your bank. We can refund you faster than a dispute can, and disputes threaten the payment account the whole site depends on.

6. A closed week is final

While a week is live, refunds reduce that week's pool. Once a week closes, its result is frozen: the crown, the totals and the standings are stored as a snapshot and are never recalculated. Refunds granted after a week closes are honoured in money but do not alter that record. This is deliberate and it is not negotiable — a record that can be rewritten later is worth nothing to the fandoms it belongs to.

7. Nicknames, messages and anything else you type

• Nothing you type appears publicly until it passes a review. Display is opt-in, not opt-out.
• We may edit, hide, refuse or remove any nickname or message at any time, with or without explanation, and doing so never affects the money you gave or the total it counted towards.
• By submitting a nickname or a Throne message you give us permission to display it on this site and in the share cards this site generates.
• Do not submit anything that identifies another person, impersonates staff or an official account, or that you would not want screenshotted next to a fandom's name.

8. Acceptable use

• Do not use a payment method that is not yours.
• Do not deliberately work around the rolling limit, for example by cycling email addresses.
• Do not automate payments, scrape aggressively, or try to break, overload or deface the site.
• Do not use this site to harass a person, a fandom or an artist.

If you do any of that we may refuse service, refund and remove your contributions, and stop displaying anything you submitted.

9. No affiliation, and the names on this site

StanClash is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to any artist, group, agency, label or company. Fandom names, group names and artist names are used referentially, to identify communities of fans. There are no artist photographs and no group logos on this site.

Some fandom names may be registered trademarks of their owners. Nothing here claims any right in them, and nothing here should be read as implying a relationship that does not exist. If you represent a rights holder and want something changed, write to [TO BE CONFIRMED: rights contact email] and we will act on it quickly.

Everything else on this site — the design, the copy, the code and the generated cards — belongs to the operator.

10. No accounts

There is no login and no account to lose. Your contribution is tied to a salted hash of the email address you paid with, not to the address itself, which is why you may be asked for that address when you contact us about a specific payment. See privacy.

11. Availability, and what we are responsible for

This is a small site run on a small budget, and it can break. We do not promise it is available, uninterrupted or free of bugs, and features can change or disappear.

If something goes wrong with a payment, our responsibility is to give you your money back. Beyond refunding what you actually paid us, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, and the mechanic here is not something anyone should be relying on financially. Nothing in these terms removes rights you have under consumer law where you live. [TO BE CONFIRMED: enforceable limitation-of-liability wording for the chosen jurisdiction]

12. Changes, and the end of the site

We may change these terms. The version on this page is the current one, and changes apply from the moment they are published; a week that has already closed is never re-scored under new terms. If we shut the site down we will say so on the about page, stop taking payments, and honour refunds still inside the 72-hour window.

13. Governing law

[TO BE CONFIRMED: governing law and the courts with jurisdiction].

14. What a lawyer still needs to check

Published deliberately, so nobody has to guess how finished this is. In rough order of how much it would cost to get wrong:

1. The operating entity, its registered address, and which country's law and courts govern these terms.
2. Whether any regulator in a market we accept money from would classify this mechanic as a game of chance, a paid competition, or a promotional draw. Our position is that it is none of those: the outcome is a public sum of contributions with no random element and nothing of monetary value awarded. That position needs confirming market by market.
3. Consumer withdrawal rights for digital services in the EU, the UK and anywhere else with a statutory cooling-off period, and whether our 72-hour policy meets or needs to exceed them.
4. Whether 16 is a sufficient minimum age in every market, and whether parental consent language is required where it is not.
5. Polar's merchant-of-record agreement: what we are obliged to disclose about it, and how tax collection and refunds must be described to fans.
6. Trademark exposure from fandom names, several of which are likely registered marks, and whether referential use plus a prominent disclaimer is enough in the relevant jurisdictions.
7. Data protection: the lawful basis for storing a salted hash of an email address, whether that hash is personal data (we assume it is and treat it that way), the processor relationship with Polar, and what our published privacy notice is missing.
8. Whether any of the public claims on this site — the transparency statements, the no-questions refund, the rolling limit — create obligations we must be able to prove we met.
9. Tax treatment of the revenue, and of refunds crossing a tax period.
10. What happens to the frozen record and to any outstanding refunds if the site is sold, closed or handed to someone else.
11. Whether the limitation of liability in clause 11 is enforceable as written where it matters.