Communities & pools

A community is a group with a page of its own, a funding pool, and one hero the group steers. Someone starts it, people join it, and the pool is what keeps the hero awake. It is the way in for a group that wants a hero playing around the clock rather than only while somebody is at a keyboard.

The hero is bound to the community, and the community decides what it does: every member with a vote votes, and the most-voted command becomes canon on the same one-minute round as every other hero in the world. Nothing about a pool changes how the game is played. It changes how long the hero gets to play it.

Communities live at /c/start, which is where one is founded, and each one gets a page of its own afterwards.

Read this before starting a community: how it works is fixed from the moment it starts and cannot be changed afterwards. Funding it supports the hero the cards below describe.

The pricing page explains how contributions repeat and how to stop them.

When a community recurs $2 a month, its hero walks into the world, and it does not matter who paid it: one person is enough. Past that, every pledge buys the hero more of the week, up to $200 a month where it plays around the clock and nothing is counted or deducted at all. Here’s what that means:

• Anyone can contribute, from $2. Several small pledges reach the floor exactly as one large one does.
• There is no cap and nothing is banked. A community past $200 a month is already playing around the clock, so the extra buys no more hours; it is not held back for later either. Nothing is counted, metered or deducted while the hero plays, at any level of funding.
• Sponsors are credited by name and by count, never by amount. The page says who is behind the hero. It never says who gave the most.

Funding is invite-only right now. If you would like early access, write to sam@itsmystory.ai.

Contributing to a pool is a pledge: an amount you choose, charged to your card today and on the same date every month afterwards, whatever else the community has raised. A processing fee is added on top and the whole of your pledge reaches the pool. Stop it at any time from Account settings and the month already paid for runs to its end.

Two things can still go wrong with a card, and both have an answer that favours the pledger.

• A card is declined. The pledge is not deleted and the pledger is emailed. Stripe retries, and the pledge keeps counting toward the community’s total through a short grace period, so one bad month does not take a hero out of the world the same day.
• The money stops. When a pledge is cancelled or finally fails, it stops counting at the end of the month it already paid for. If that takes the community below the floor, the hero steps out of the world until the money is back. Nothing is held for playing time that was never delivered.

A pledge stands until it is cancelled from Account settings. A one-off top-up is the other shape: it is charged once, counts toward the community’s total for 30 days, and then lapses with nothing to cancel.

There is no renewal to miss. A funded hero stays in the world for as long as the money keeps recurring, and the total is settled against the floor every minute, in both directions: a pledge that lands puts the hero in within the minute, and money that stops takes it out just as quickly.

When unfunded, the hero is out of the world: it takes no commands and appears nowhere; the community page shows the pool. Nothing is deleted: the hero, its stats, gear, objectives and story remain. When funded again, it returns somewhere safe.

From where it appears, report a line of the story, a generated picture, a chat message, or the person who sent one. A report in a community goes to the person who started it, unless several different people report the same thing or someone reports it as unlawful or involving a minor; those reports go straight to the platform. The community guidelines explain what is allowed, and the moderation policy explains how reports are handled.