Rules
Riyasat is a public board of Indian heritage. There are 36 state crowns and 136 heritage places — 172 in all, and never any more. You pay to stand above everyone else on one of them. Position is what you have staked; nothing else.
What a place costs
- Every place opens at $5. The Taj Mahal and a fort nobody has heard of start at the same price.
- Taking a place off whoever holds it costs $5 more than they have staked. Flat, at every size.
- Raising your own stake on a place you already hold also costs $5.
- Equal stakes keep the order they were reached in — the earlier claim keeps the place.
- Prices are in US dollars and exclude any local tax added at checkout.
- The most that can go through one payment is $999,999.
Your stake stays where you put it
What you have paid toward a place is your stake on it, and it does not go away when someone passes you. Reclaiming costs only the difference.
If you staked $20 and someone takes the place at $40, you do not pay $45 to get it back — you pay $25, because your $20 is still there. Someone with no stake on that place pays the whole $45. The discount is only ever your own money.
A stake is spent, not saved. It cannot be withdrawn, refunded, moved to another place, or given to anyone else. It only ever buys position on the one place you put it on.
All-time and Today
The board can be read two ways, and one payment counts on both.
- All-time is the main board. Position is everything you have ever staked on a place. It does not expire.
- Today is a rolling twenty-four hours. A payment counts from the moment you make it and drops out of that view a day later.
Dropping out of Today costs you nothing on the all-time board, and is not a refund.
The siege
A state’s crown is never cheaper than 1.6 × the stakes on the heritage places inside it. Buying the places inside a state pushes its crown up. A crown with nothing beneath it costs $5; a crown over $100 of staked places costs $160.
How clicks are counted
The number on a listing is what justifies its price, so here is exactly how it is worked out. Two numbers, because they are not the same thing:
- Clicks — every genuine press of the link. Five presses by one person is five clicks. Only rapid repeats within ten seconds are ignored, because a browser pre-fetch or a double click is not two visits.
- Visitors — distinct people, counted once a day.
Bots are filtered out before either number moves. That is the real defence; de-duplication is only there to stop double counting.
A visitor is identified by a one-way hash of the network address and browser. We never store the address itself. That method has honest limits and you should know them: two Chrome profiles on one machine count as one visitor (correctly — it is one person), two browsers on one machine count as two, and several people sharing one office or home connection with the same browser may count as one. Clicks are unaffected by any of this; only the visitor number is an estimate.
Manipulating either number — clicking your own link repeatedly, paying others to, or automating it — is a breach of the Terms.
What you can list
- A website you own or are authorised to represent.
- Not a competitor’s site, and not somebody else’s brand.
- Not link shorteners, chat or invite links, or redirects that hide the destination.
- Not adult content, and nothing illegal, deceptive, or infringing.
- Your handle, name, and logo come from the address you enter. You can write your own one line.
- One domain, one listing. Do not bid against yourself through a second domain to inflate a price or manufacture a contest, and do not coordinate with others to fake one. We reverse positions and forfeit stakes where we find it.
After you pay
- Your listing is public and links out to your site.
- A completed payment is what claims the place. Payments are final and not refundable.
- If someone stakes more while your payment is clearing, your money still becomes stake on that place. Nothing is lost, and nothing is refunded.
- We may remove a listing that breaks these Rules or the Terms, without refund.
- Your listing is public and stays on the record: the handle, name, description, amounts and times can be seen by anyone and archived.
Paying means you agree to the Terms of Service, which govern in the event of any conflict with this page. What we collect and why is in the Privacy Policy.