Distribution game · public record

Seasons and scoring weights

The exact numbers the game scores by. Published before a season starts, and never changed once it has. If we want to score differently, we have to say so in advance, in public, and start a new season — we cannot quietly reprice what you already earned.

Why this page exists

Every referral scheme can be rewritten by the people who run it. Most are. The usual version is silent: the multiplier drops, the cap tightens, and the only way to notice is to have written the old numbers down yourself.

So we made that structurally impossible instead of promising it wouldn’t happen. A weights row in our database cannot be updated once a season references it — that is a constraint in the schema, not a line in a policy document. Rescoring requires a new weights version and a new season, and a new season has to be published here first.

A promise you can break quietly is not a promise. This one takes a migration and a commit.

The record

No season has been published yet. The game has not started, no weights version has been referenced, and nothing has been scored. This page will fill in before the first season opens, not after.

That is the honest state today, and stating it is the point: an empty record you can check is worth more than a full one you cannot.

Reading the table

  • Degree is distance along the chain. Degree 1 is someone who installed from your link; degree 2 is someone who installed from their link, and so on up to the depth cap.
  • Weight is what an activation at that degree is worth.
  • Stored as is the integer actually in the database — weights are scaled by 10,000 and stored as whole numbers, so 10000 means 1.0000. Nothing in a standing is ever a floating-point number. Float drift in a leaderboard is a support ticket nobody can answer.

Check it against the server

GET /v1/seasons — not yet public

This page is a committed snapshot, not a live query — a page that fetches on load is a page that goes blank exactly when people care most. The endpoint above is the live source, and the two must agree for any closed season. If they ever don’t, that is a bug worth publishing, and we would rather hear it in public.

The no-spam covenant

The game rewards sharing, and “rewards sharing” is how most software ends up in a mailbox nobody asked it to be in. Four rules, and they bind us, not you:

  • We never send on your behalf. SCL has no contact list, no address-book access, and no “invite your co-authors” button that sends anything without you typing it and pressing send.
  • Playing is opt-in, and off by default. An install that never joins the game is a node that never exists.
  • No public leaderboard names anyone who did not ask. Nodes are opaque identifiers. Attaching a name to one is a separate, one-way, explicitly-chosen act.
  • Bulk unsolicited sending is disqualifying, not clever. A chain that looks like a mail blast is quarantined — points held and visible and appealable, never silently zeroed.

We would rather grow slower than become the thing that turns up uninvited in a colleague’s inbox with a researcher’s name forged on it.

What the game measures, and which ledger it measures it in, is on the transparency page.