Bunifun

##Accounts and profiles One account per identity, which is what stops a leaderboard being fiction.

Sign in with Google or with an email code. An account is tied to the identity behind it, and that is a deliberate anti-manipulation control rather than a convenience: a board where one person can be a hundred voters describes nothing.

##Username Your handle, used in chat and on boards. You can change it. ##Display name What appears beside your avatar. Changeable, and it is what a screen reader announces. ##Reputation Earned by taking part. See Reputation. ##Personality A description of your voting pattern — The Contrarian, The Early Bird. Entertainment, and nothing else: it is not a judgement of whether you are right. Your profile at /u/your-username is public: your display name, avatar, reputation and badges. Your individual votes are not on it, and there is no page anywhere that lists them.

##Buni Verified An identity-checked badge beside your name, for a monthly membership.

Buni Verified says one thing: this person is who their name says. Anyone can have it — a rater or a creator — and it is the only thing on BuniFun you can pay for.

1. Your identity

You photograph a government ID and take a selfie in our identity partner's secure page (Smile ID). We never see or keep the images or your ID number — only whether it passed and the name printed on the document.

1. Your name

Your display name has to be the name on your ID — at least two of its words, and nothing that is not on it. A stage name or a name the document spells differently is looked at by a person before the badge shows.

1. The membership

Only after the check passes do you subscribe, through Paystack. You are never asked to pay for a badge that cannot be shown. Cancel any time; the badge stays until the end of the month you paid for. It buys no weight. Your vote counts the same as everybody else's, and the badge never changes a result, a score, trending or your reputation. Money can move where you are shown; it can never move what a number says. See what money can and cannot do.

What it does get you: a member frame and your Verified Voice card on your profile, a place in the Verified Arena, advanced statistics on your Pulse, a profile theme, early access to new features, priority support, and protection for your name — a second account whose document shares it goes to a person rather than getting the badge automatically. Verified creators also get views and returning viewers, advanced analytics and audience insights in the studio, a Creator Card, a place in the featured creators rail (always labelled as featured, rotated daily) and protection against lookalike handles. Every creator tool that was free stays free.

Earned labels are never for sale. VERIFIED VOICE and VERIFIED VETERAN need the badge and the activity behind ARENA VOICE and ARENA VETERAN — see BuniScore.

It is drawn differently from the earned marks — the bunny in a ring, in cyan — so it is never mistaken for a creator's verification, which cannot be bought. Change your display name and the badge hides until the new name is matched to your ID; no second check is needed if the name is on the document.

Three identity checks are allowed in thirty days, because each costs a fee whether it passes or not. Staff can remove the badge for impersonation or abuse, with a reason you can read; the subscription stops with it. Start at /verified.

##Finding something to vote on The home page, search, and the boards.

##Live now Sessions open for voting this minute. This is the front page. ##Trending The closest arguments with real turnout — see Trending. ##Search Subjects, sessions and creators by name. ##Boards Standing rankings — see Leaderboards. ##Following Follow a creator, a subject or a category and what they do reaches you rather than needing to be found. Where notifications are switched on you can also be told when a session you care about opens. That is one permission prompt, and we only ask it once you have chosen to follow something — a prompt on arrival costs your permission permanently and buys nothing.

##How voting works One vote per person per session, cast while the window is open, and then locked.

1. Open a session. You can read it signed out; voting needs an account.
2. Pick your answer. The control acknowledges in under a tenth of a second — the result you see is your vote landing, not a guess.
3. Optionally say why. It takes one tap and it is what makes the result readable afterwards.
4. Watch the tally move, argue in chat, and come back when it closes.

A vote cannot be changed or withdrawn. Not by you, not by a moderator, not by an administrator. There is no control anywhere that edits a vote, and nothing behind the scenes that could.

That is strict on purpose. A tally you can watch move is only meaningful if what you are watching is people making up their minds rather than reacting to the score. If votes could be switched, the last minute of every session would be the only minute that mattered.

If you try to vote twice you are told you already have, and shown the ballot you cast. Signing in mid-vote carries your choice through the sign-in and commits it on the other side, so you do not lose it.

##The four formats What kind of question is being asked.

##Head to head Two options, one winner. The default, and the one that produces the sharpest arguments. ##Ranking Up to six options, ordered by the room. You submit an order, not a single pick. ##Rating out of ten One subject, scored. These are shrunk towards the category average until enough people have voted — see the published numbers — so four tens do not outrank nine thousand nine-point-fours. ##Category battle Two subjects compared across several named dimensions at once — lyrics, delivery, consistency — rather than on one overall question. A session also has a status. Scheduled means it has not opened yet; open means vote now; closed means settled. Two more exist and both are visible: cancelled, and invalidated — a result set aside because the voting was not honest. An invalidated session keeps its page and states the reason, because a result quietly disappearing is indistinguishable from one being hidden.

##Saying why A tap, not an essay — and it is what makes a result mean something.

After voting you can attach one or more reasons from a fixed list appropriate to the category. They are counted, never quoted: the session page afterwards can say the room went this way mainly on consistency, which is a far better summary than the raw split.

A fixed list rather than free text, deliberately. Free text needs moderating, and a box that invites a paragraph gets a paragraph from the loudest people only.

Results, and why they never change# Settled once, frozen, and stamped with the method that produced it.

When the window closes the result is worked out once and written down. Every later place it appears — a leaderboard, a share card, a season standing, this page — reads that same frozen record. Nothing is worked out a second time.

Each result records the version of the scoring method that produced it. That is what lets the formula improve without rewriting history: an old result always names the rules it was settled under.

##Chat and comments
Chat while it is open; comments once it is settled.

##Chat
Live, during the session, in the room. Fast and disposable — it is the crowd noise, and it is where the argument actually happens.
Comments
Threaded, under a closed result, and they persist. This is where somebody explains why the room got it wrong.
Both are moderated — see Moderation. A host has controls of their own over the room they are running: slow mode, locking chat, removing a message, and timing somebody out of that session.

##Topics and catching up#
A busy room holds several arguments at once. Topics are how you find one.

A room with six hundred messages is not one conversation. Somebody is arguing about the albums, somebody about the live shows, somebody about the numbers. The Topics tab shows those conversations one at a time — the same messages as the room, grouped by what they are about.

##Where topics come from
BuniFun notices when three or more people keep using the same words, and groups them. The host can name topics before the session starts. And anybody who can chat can press + Start topic — two per person per room.
Where a message goes
Wherever you choose when you send it. Otherwise a reply joins the topic of what it answers, and a message whose words clearly match one topic is filed there. A message is in one topic at most, and most stay in the room alone.

##Following
Follow a topic to keep up with that one argument: a +7 new in the room that jumps to the first message you have not read, a notification if it gets busy while you are away, and one if the same argument starts up in another session.

##Catch me up
Arrive to a room that has moved on and BuniFun tells you how much you missed, what the room is arguing about, and what changed — which conversation took over, which take the room reacted to. Every line is a fact read off the room, not a summary, and the conversations are one tap away.

##Clashes Two people in the chat, a formal argument, and the room as the judge.

When two people are clearly going back and forth, the room is shown This looks like a clash. Nothing happens unless somebody presses Challenge on the other person’s message and they accept. A clash is always two people, and a room runs one at a time.

##Four rounds Eight turns, alternating, and whoever challenged goes first — they made the claim. Each turn is up to 280 characters. Two minutes a turn Every turn is on a clock. A turn not taken in time is skipped: it scores nothing and the other person is up. It is not a forfeit — the clash carries on. The room judges Anybody watching can like or dislike any turn while the clash runs and for five minutes after the last one. The two people in it cannot vote in their own clash. The verdict Each side's likes minus dislikes, added up over its own turns. The higher score wins; level — including nobody voting — is a draw. Both people are told, and it goes on their profile as won, lost or drawn. A clash never touches the session’s result. Who won the argument and which option won the vote are counted separately, and neither can move the other.