The rules of the island, in plain English.

The Island is an entertainment ranking service. When you enter a market, your stake buys exactly one thing: placement in that market's ranked lineup, at the rank your total credited dollars earn, rendered continuously and publicly for as long as your listing is live. That continuous rendering is the service. We begin delivering it the second your listing goes live, and we keep delivering it every second it stays on the board.

Rank is total credited stake, highest first, within one market. Ties go to whoever bid first. The founder's $1 anchor listing sits permanently last, whatever anyone pays. Nothing except money moves rank — not roses, not reports, not us. Every public number on the site is counted on our own servers and printed exactly as counted.

Because the service is exposure being rendered rather than a result being promised, it is delivered in full and cannot be returned. That is the basis of the money rules in section 02, and it is why we print them at checkout before you pay rather than after.

1. 01Stakes are non-refundable. They are purchases of exposure that is being rendered, not deposits. Being outranked refunds nothing — that is what all-pay means, and it is the game you are entering.
2. 02Delisting forfeits your position and your stake. If you take your listing down, or we take it down for cause, the money stays in the pot. There is no partial refund for the time you did not use.
3. 03A dead handle that returns starts at $0. If your link stops working and your listing comes off the board, a later listing is a new listing. Stakes never revive.
4. 04A submission that never goes live is never charged. We check your photo before we ask you for anything: entering takes no card and no payment details at all. Only an entry that clears is shown a checkout, and paying it is what puts you live at rank — one charge, at that moment. An entry we reject, or an escalation that ends in a no, is never shown a payment page, so there is nothing to refund because nothing was ever taken. An entry that clears and is not paid for expires after 24 hours, and nothing has happened at all.

Prices are in whole US dollars. The minimum entry stake is $2, the increment is $1, and a top-up pays the difference you choose and adds to your lifetime total — a top-up never resets the tie-break on your first bid.

Beyond those four rules we keep one discretion and use it in your favor: where a removal for cause takes a large stake off the board early, or where anything about a charge is genuinely ambiguous, we would rather refund it than argue. Ask before you dispute.

Filing a chargeback on a listing we actually rendered is fraud, and it is the one thing that gets you permanently banned from entering again. Two exits carry their own money outcomes set in advance — an underage contestant is refunded in full, which is the only exit that gives back money we had actually charged, and legal compulsion is handled case by case. Every exit and its money outcome is published on the Safety page.

You must be at least 18 years old to use this site, to enter the lineup, to pay us, or to submit a photo. By entering you represent that you are 18 or older and that every person who appears in the photo you upload is 18 or older.

You may enter only on your own behalf: your own first name, your own face, and a dating profile you personally control. Entering somebody else — a friend, an ex, a stranger, a public figure — violates these terms, and an impersonation report takes that listing off the board immediately.

Our policy when we learn that a contestant is under 18 is fixed in advance and is not discretionary: we remove the listing, delete the photo and any avatar made from it, and refund the stake in full. A person carries that out rather than a machine — but what they do is settled before anyone asks, and there is nothing to negotiate. The Island is a United States service and is not offered anywhere else in this version.

By entering, you grant The Island a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, resize, re-encode, crop, display, and distribute the photo, first name, market, division, and stake you submit, for the purpose of operating and promoting the service — on the site, in share cards, in the weekly ceremony recap, and in our own posts about the board. The license includes the right to generate and display an illustrated avatar derived from your photo; that derivative is display-only, and it is deleted whenever the photo is.

By entering, you warrant that:

1. 01the photo is of you, and it is a real photograph of a real person who is you;
2. 02you own it or otherwise have every right needed to license it to us;
3. 03it is not of anyone else, not of a public figure, not stock imagery, and not generated to look like either;
4. 04it contains no nudity, sexual content, hateful content, or text, contact details, or QR codes; and
5. 05displaying it here infringes nobody's rights, and you have told us the truth.

When your listing leaves the island, the license ends for any new use, and we delete the stored photo and any avatar made from it in the same operation that takes you off the board. What is already in the world stays in the world: a share card somebody saved, a recap already posted, a screenshot of a board. We cannot recall those, and we do not pretend we can.

We issue every contestant a random 5-digit code, appended to the handle you give us with no separator — maxsong becomes maxsong48291. Your listing links to tinder.com/@{handle}{code} and to nothing else. The digits are always ours: we build the link from a code this server issued, never from digits somebody typed at us. That is what makes a listing entered by someone who does not own the handle point at a page that does not exist instead of at a stranger. Digits can collide, though, and we do not pretend otherwise — if the coded link happens to open a real profile, the "test your link" step on the entry screen is where it shows up, and we issue different digits on the spot.

You agree to keep the code on your handle for as long as your listing is live. Removing it or renaming away is a de facto exit: the link dies, the listing comes off the board when that is confirmed, and money rule 2 applies. We never verify your handle with anyone, and we make no server request to Tinder or any other dating platform, ever — no fetch, no check, no scraping, no cached copy of their pages. The "test your link" button opens in your browser, as you, like any other visitor.

We may remove any listing, refuse any entry, suspend a contestant, or discontinue the service at any time, with or without notice, for any reason or no reason. Nothing in these terms obliges us to keep any listing on the board.

The discretion is broad; the published policy is narrow, and it is the policy we actually run. The Safety page lists every report category and exactly what each one does, what happens before a listing ever reaches the board, and the money outcome of every way of leaving the island. Two of those rules matter enough to restate here. A report that a live listing's photo is not the contestant's own — the impersonation report — takes that listing off the air immediately, on the first report, before a human has looked; that is the only thing on this site that removes anybody automatically, and a person reviews it afterwards. And report volume never removes anything, because mass reporting would otherwise be a free way to sabotage a paid slot. Counts do not decide. People do.

You may take your own listing down at any time, instantly, from the management page linked in your entry confirmation email. It is irrevocable and it forfeits your stake.

Rank is the deliverable. Clicks are not. We do not promise any number of roses, profile visits, matches, messages, dates, followers, or attention of any kind, and no stake buys any of them. A rose is one outbound click on your card, counted at the redirect and de-duplicated per viewer per day. Roses are a number, not a vote: they do not move rank, and no viewer action ever will.

Audience counts, rose counts, and pots are server-counted and published exactly as counted. We do not pad them, and we would rather show a small honest number than a large invented one.

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent the law allows — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither The Island nor anyone who works on it is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost matches, or reputational harm. Our total liability to you for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of $100 or the total you staked in the 90 days before the claim arose. Some states do not allow these limits; where that is true, they apply only as far as the law allows.

The Island is an independent site. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise connected to Tinder, Match Group, or any dating platform. No relationship between us should be inferred from anything on this site.

"Tinder" is a trademark of its owner. We use the word nominatively and only as far as we must: to tell a contestant what kind of handle to give us, and to tell a viewer where a link goes. We do not use their logos, their trade dress, their fonts, their screenshots, or their catchphrases; we do not host, copy, cache, or display their content; and we make no server request to their site for any reason. Every outbound link is a plain link, followed by a person, in that person's own browser.

Our dating-show furniture — contestants, roses, contestant numbers, pots, ceremonies, and an affectionate narrator — is genre grammar, not anyone's mark. We do not use the names, logos, or catchphrases of any television program.

Price and access never depend on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability, or any other protected characteristic. The $2 minimum and the $1 increment are the same for every contestant, in every market, in both divisions. There is no gender-based pricing, no gender-based gating, and no gender-based promotion on this site, and there never will be.

At launch we invited a small number of founding contestants and paid their $2 entry ourselves, through ordinary checkout. Those invitations were individual, facially neutral, and not based on any protected characteristic. Divisions are self-declared, priced identically, and exist to organize the board — not to sort who is welcome.

We respond to notices of claimed copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We have not yet registered a designated agent with the Copyright Office, and we are not going to describe one we do not have; until that filing is done, notices reach us at the address below and we act on them exactly as described here.

DMCA notices:[contact — agent registration pending]

A complete notice includes:

1. 01your physical or electronic signature;
2. 02identification of the copyrighted work you say is infringed;
3. 03the URL of the listing or material you are asking us to remove, specific enough for us to find it;
4. 04your name, address, telephone number, and email address;
5. 05a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. 06a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act on the owner's behalf.

We remove or disable material that is the subject of a complete notice, and we terminate repeat infringers. Counter-notices go to the same address and must contain the statements the DMCA requires, including your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for your district. Knowingly filing a false notice carries liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

If the problem is that the photo is of you rather than by you, do not wait for any of this: use the "Not their photo / impersonation" report on the listing itself. It unlists immediately, and a human investigates afterwards.

These terms, and any dispute arising out of or relating to them, the service, or your stake, are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

You and The Island agree to resolve any such dispute by binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules, seated in California, before one arbitrator. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction. The arbitrator decides all issues except those a court must decide, and the availability of class relief is for a court, not the arbitrator.

You and The Island each give up the right to a jury trial and the right to bring or take part in a class action, class arbitration, collective action, or any representative proceeding. Claims are heard one person at a time. No arbitration may be consolidated with anyone else's without the written consent of everyone involved.

Two things stay outside arbitration. Either of us may bring a qualifying claim in small claims court, and either of us may ask a court for an injunction to stop intellectual property infringement or abuse of the platform.

You can opt out of this arbitration agreement within 30 days of your first entry. Write to us with the words arbitration opt-out and the email address you entered with, at the same address as everything else: Arbitration opt-out:[contact]. Do not reply to one of our emails — they are sent from an address that cannot receive mail, so a reply reaches nobody. Opting out costs nothing, changes nothing else about these terms, and has no effect on your listing. If the class waiver is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim proceeds in court and the rest of this section survives.

Privacy. Our full privacy policy is being written with counsel and will be published here; the posture we already operate under — city-level location only, no raw IP addresses stored, no comments, no direct messages, no public API or bulk export — is described on the Safety page.

Changes. We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and a change that affects money is shown on the entry screen before you pay. Your existing stake is governed by the terms in force when you made it; continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the new version.

Accounts. There are no viewer accounts and no member profiles. The email you pay with is your identity here, and a one-time code sent to that address is how you prove it. Keep it reachable — it is the only way back to your listing.

The rest. If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing something once is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them to a successor of the service. Together with the Safety page, this is the entire agreement between us about The Island.

Contact. Copyright notices go to the address in section 10. Everything else:[contact]

That is the whole rulebook. No small print underneath it, no clause we were hoping you'd scroll past — just a board where the numbers are real and everyone knows exactly how they got there.