TERMS OF USE

What the championship is

A weekly knockout between websites. Sixteen sites are drawn into a bracket and play a straight knockout over one weekend, and every duel is decided by a measurement taken from the two sites and compared with the same measurement from the other. The field is frozen and published with a SHA-256 hash before a card is drawn, so any result can be replayed from the same numbers. Using the site means accepting what is on this page.

It is entertainment built on measurements, and it is not an audit, a ranking, a certification or advice. A site losing a duel means one number was lower than another number on one Friday. Nothing here is a professional opinion about anybody's website, and nothing here should be relied on as one.

Entering a site

Anybody with an account can put a domain into the queue, including a domain they do not own. That is deliberate — the measurements are taken from pages the site publishes to everybody, and comparing published facts is fair comment — but it has limits, and they are these:

• Only public, resolvable, non-private hosts. Anything else is refused at the door.
• The measurement is polite: a small number of requests, an honest user agent, and robots.txt respected.
• Nothing is stated about a site that was not measured, and every number shown can be traced back to the frozen dataset it came from.
• If your site is in the queue and you would rather it were not, it comes out. Prove control of the domain on your account and remove it yourself, or ask from an address at that domain. A site that has already played stays in the archive, because the results of a broadcast weekend are a record.

Claiming a domain — by DNS record, meta tag or a file at a known path — proves control of it. A claim is not a result and buys nothing: it decides who may speak for the site here, and nothing else.

Votes and the queue

A site in the queue collects votes, and the sites at the top of the queue are the next field. One account is one vote per weekend, worked out on the server. Votes accumulate for as long as it takes and are spent in full the week a site plays, so the queue always moves. Nothing about the queue is a promise of a place on a particular date.

What is sold

A tournament seatis a place in a specific weekend's field for a queued domain nobody else has claimed. It buys entry to the bracket and nothing else: the seed, the draw and every duel are decided by the same frozen measurements as everyone else's. Paid seats are labelled as paid wherever they appear. Stripe is the seller of record for a seat and issues the receipt for it.

A sponsorshipis a named place on a specific weekend — the headline band or a partner place — shown on the broadcast and on that weekend's pages, with the brand name, link and logo supplied by the buyer. Prices are quoted net; VAT is added at checkout, and an EU business that gives a valid VAT number is handled under the reverse charge.

Holding, paying, and a closed tab

Placing an order takes a hold, not the place itself: thirty minutes, after which an unpaid hold lapses and the place goes back on sale. The order is the durable thing and a checkout is an attempt at paying it — closing the payment tab loses nothing, and coming back to the order's own page reopens the checkout without taking a second hold.

Money is never refused for arriving late. A payment against a lapsed hold revives the order and takes the place if it is still free; if somebody else has taken it, the order waits, paid, until it is settled — by placing it on another weekend or refunding it, whichever you prefer.

An order keeps the amount it was taken at. Changing a price never re-prices a checkout already in flight.

What we can refuse

Sponsorship creative that is illegal, deceptive, or that implies the championship endorses a product or has judged a website, is refused and refunded. The same goes for anything that would make a credit screen look like a result. This is a judgement call and it is ours.

Refunds, and why a result stands

Ask for a refund before the weekend is drawn and you get one in full. After the draw is published, a seat has been used: the bracket is public, the pairings depend on it, and unmaking one would change somebody else's match. After a sponsorship has been shown on a broadcast, it has been delivered.

A refund never unmakes a result. It is recorded beside the sale, and the weekend it belonged to stays exactly as it aired. Editing a played tournament to match a bank balance would falsify the archive, which is the one thing this site is for.

If you are a consumer in the EU, your statutory right to withdraw within fourteen days applies — except where you asked for the service to start sooner and it has been performed, which for a weekend that has already been played it has.

Accounts

One account per email address; keep the password to yourself. An account that is used to spam the queue, to game the vote, or to submit domains in bad faith can be suspended without notice. You can delete your account at any time — see the privacy policy for what that removes and what stays.

The site itself

The broadcast, the brand and the code are ours; the brand files on the press page are free for editorial use, on the terms stated there. A logo you upload stays yours, and you give us permission to show it on the weekend you bought and in the archive of it.

The service is provided as it is. It runs on one server on a schedule; a weekend can be delayed, a measurement can fail, and a site that cannot be measured in time forfeits its match rather than being swapped out of a published draw. Where a paid place is affected by a failure on our side, the remedy is a refund or a place on another weekend — and liability is limited to what was paid.

Your rights where you live

Nothing on this page takes away a consumer's rights under the law of the country they live in. Where the two disagree, that law wins.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. An order is governed by the version that was current when it was placed.

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