THE RULES

One dollar buys the flame one more minute of life, and buys you one minute as its keeper — your name, your tagline and your link on the plaque every visitor sees. The clock is server time. Nothing you do in your browser moves it.

A single payment is capped at 180 minutes ($180). The flame is meant to be kept by many people in turn, not bought outright by whoever has the deepest pockets. If you want to be seen for longer than that, the lantern below is the honest way to do it. Give as many times as you like.

However much is given, the clock will not bank more than 48 hours of life at once. When a gift arrives at a full clock, the surplus is not refused and not refunded:

Your watch is always served in full. Every minute you paid for still puts your name on the flame for that long. Only the life the flame can store is capped, and the difference is recorded publicly as devotion in the ledger. Time on the clock is capped; time with your name on it never is.

The give form tells you before you pay whenever this applies to the amount you have chosen.

The lantern is a single patron slot, and it works differently from everything else here:

• It costs $250 and lasts 2 hours.
• One holder at a time. While it is held it cannot be bought, at any price. When it comes free, the next person may take it.
• While you hold it, your name sits above the flame — the flame burns in the lantern of you — and stays there whoever is on watch beneath you. It is on the share card too.
• It buys presence, and nothing else. No minutes on the flame, no watch in the queue — the whole payment is recorded as patronage. If you want to give the flame time, give it minutes; that is what they are for. It does not buy a place in the founding keepers either.
• If the flame dies during your hold, your lantern dies with it. There is no refund for the unused time — but you are named on the memorial as the flame's final patron, permanently, and the mark stays on your entry in the roll. The site cannot give the hours back, so it gives you the only thing it has left.
• If two people pay for it at the same moment, exactly one gets it and the other is refunded automatically, in full, without being asked.

The first 10 keepers — not the first 10 gifts — each receive 15 extra minutes on their first gift, on the flame's life and on their own watch alike, and keep the founding mark for good. Giving again does not take a second place and does not earn a second bonus; your mark stays either way. When the places are gone the offer disappears from the site rather than lingering as decoration. Lantern purchases take no place.

Every link is checked automatically before your money moves. Chat invites, shorteners, brand-impersonating subdomains, raw addresses, punycode, download extensions and wallet-phishing paths are refused at checkout, and query strings are stripped from everything. A link that is refused later still keeps your name, your minutes and your flame time — it simply stops being clickable. There is no human moderator, and no appeal, because there is nobody to appeal to.

If a payment settles after the flame has gone out, or before the vigil was lit, or for a lantern someone else took in the same instant, it is refunded automatically and in full. Otherwise a gift is not refundable: the minutes were spent the moment they were given, which is the point of them. Refunding a gift does not remove the time — the flame keeps what it was given.

Before the flame is lit there is no clock and nothing is for sale. When it is armed, the give form opens and the first payment to settle creates the vigil — with nothing but that keeper's own minutes. No head start, no grace period: a $1 founding gift lights a flame with 16 minutes to live, and it survives only if other people keep feeding it. That keeper is marked as the one who lit it, permanently. If the arrangement would produce a flame with under 5 minutes, the payment is refunded instead — that would be a misconfiguration, not a gamble.

Your name, tagline and link go on the roll the moment your payment settles, and stay there for as long as the site exists. The plaque is rented by the minute and the feed scrolls away; the roll does neither. If the flame goes out, the whole roll becomes the memorial.

If the clock runs out the site becomes a memorial. The roll of every keeper stays up, and nothing further can be bought, ever. There is no restart. That is the entire premise, and it is not a figure of speech.