How it works
Short version: you put three small links on your website, and those links carry visitors around a circle of other websites. The more real people you pass along, the higher you sit on the list.
The five steps
- You add three little links to your site: prev, outlink, next.
- That is your membership. No money, no account, no sign-up.
- When somebody clicks one of them, we send them on to another member's site — and we count it.
- The more real people you pass around the ring, the higher you go.
- Take the links down and you slide off. Put them back and you return, exactly where you were.
Why links instead of money
Because anyone can pay. There are boards where the top spot costs fourteen thousand dollars, and all that proves is that somebody had fourteen thousand dollars.
A link is different. You can only put one on a website you actually control, and there is only so much room on a homepage. Nobody has a thousand homepages. That makes it the one thing on the internet you cannot simply buy in bulk.
The rule that matters most
Any one website can only ever hand you 25 counted visitors a day. After that, more visitors from the same place are worth almost nothing.
So you cannot win by having one enormous site, and you certainly cannot win by building a hundred fake ones and pointing them all at yourself. You win by being somewhere that lots of different people genuinely go. That is the whole design, in one sentence.
Whoever sent you gets a cut
If somebody's badge brought you here, they get 10% of what you earn, and whoever sent them gets 3%. Then it stops. Two levels, and it is paid out of our books, not out of your score — you never lose anything by having a parent.
It is not a pyramid: nothing pays out, there is nothing to buy, and the chain is two links long. It is there because knowing who brought whom is what makes the ring picture worth looking at.
What happens if your link disappears
| We cannot find it | Nothing happens for 2 days. Sites break. It is fine. |
|---|---|
| Still missing | Your score halves every day for the next 7 days. |
| Still missing | You become a ghost: still listed, greyed out, score zero. Your seat is kept. |
| You put it back | You are live again on the next check, in the same seat. |
About search engines
Every link we point out at a member's site is marked
rel="nofollow ugc". In plain terms: we are not handing out
search-ranking juice, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Reciprocal-link schemes get whole sites removed from Google, and we would
rather this thing survive than make a promise that gets everyone punished.
What you get instead is real visitors, counted in public, that you can see in your own analytics. That is worth more anyway, and unlike the other thing, it is checkable.
Cheating
You are very welcome to try. Everything the scoring engine does is written down, in public, on the audit log — including every discount we apply and exactly why.
We do not ban anybody. If your traffic looks manufactured we mark it, discount it, and say so on the board where everyone can see. Getting caught is meant to be funny, not fatal.
And if you find a genuine hole, put it on the nice try board. Rule: holes get patched at midnight UTC, and whatever you scored before then, you keep.