Credits are the site's internal currency. You earn them by participating — posting, helping, getting your work noticed — and spend them on downloads, games, and a growing set of perks. This is the full map.
What you start with
Every new account starts with 500 credits (enough for ~500KB of downloads). Complete 2-factor setup and you get a one-time 5,000 credits bonus. Confirm your first friend request for 250.
How to earn
Posting and uploading — the everyday sources. All of these respect per-day ceilings now, so you can't farm one behavior into the stratosphere.
| Action | Credits | Daily cap |
|---|---|---|
| New thread | 250 | 1,000/day combined with replies |
| Reply | 100 | (same cap) |
| Uploading a file | 500 per 5KB | 10,000/day |
| Daily login | 50 | — |
| Friend request accepted | 250 | 500/day |
| 2-factor auth setup | 5,000 | one-time |
| Successful referral signup | 500 | — |
Getting noticed — the community earn sources. These reward the stuff that makes the forum worth being on, not just raw volume.
| Action | Credits | Daily cap |
|---|---|---|
| Upvote received | 1 per unique voter | 100/day |
| Marked as best answer | 50 | 250/day |
| Report actioned by a mod | 10 | 50/day |
| First post of the day | 5 | once/day |
| Staff pick (mod marks your thread) | 100 | no cap |
| Replying to a newbie's first thread (< 48h old) | 5 | 25/day |
| Successful crosspost | 5 | 25/day |
Upvote credit is per unique voter per day — sock-puppet upvotes from the same account won't stack. Same-voter re-upvotes after they rescind also won't. Shadow-banned authors earn nothing regardless.
Claw-back is automatic. Delete a post and every credit it earned reverses. Undelete replays. Rescind an upvote and that specific voter's 1 credit to the author reverses — other voters' credits stand. Every reversal is its own transaction row in your history so nothing is silently rewritten.
How to spend
The core economy:
- Download a file — 1 credit per KB. Free for files you uploaded yourself, and free to re-download anything you've already downloaded.
- Play a door game — 25 credits per launch. Win bonuses pay back out.
The new sinks (live as of this week):
- Tip another user — 10 to 10,000 credits per tip, 10,000/day out-cap, 5% tax burned so tips aren't a laundering channel. Tip button on every profile and every post that isn't yours.
- Sponsor-pin your thread — 500 (6 hours) or 1,500 (24 hours) pins your thread above the sort list on its forum. One sponsor per forum at a time.
- Cosmetics — username colors (2,500), post borders (1,500), avatar frames (2,500). One-time purchases, catalog at /account/cosmetics. One of each type active at a time.
- Gift a download — 10% tax on top of the file's cost. Recipient gets a notification and downloads free.
- Highlight a post — 100 credits for 24 hours of a pulsing cyan glow on your own post. Re-highlighting stacks the expiry.
- Change your username — 1,000 credits, once per 365 days. Form lives at the bottom of /profile/edit.
- Bump your thread — 50 credits pushes your thread back to the top of sort=new. 1/day/user, and refuses if the thread was active in the last hour.
- Give an award on a post — varies by award tier.
What it unlocks — achievements
Credit earnings are the spine of the karma-tier achievements. All of these trigger automatically when your lifetime earned total crosses the threshold:
- ⭐ Rising Star — 100 credits earned
- 🌟 Community Pillar — 1,000 credits earned
- 👑 Legendary Status — 5,000 credits earned
- 🏆 Hall of Fame — 10,000 credits earned
- ✅ Problem Solver — had a post marked as best answer
Earning milestones (1K / 5K / 10K / 50K / 100K earned, and 100 / 1K / 10K spent) fire an in-app notification the first time each one crosses.
Where to see all of this
- /account/credits — your dashboard. Current balance, lifetime earned vs spent, a 30-day balance line chart, an activity breakdown donut, and a paginated history. History rows link to the post or thread or profile that earned / spent the credit.
- /account/cosmetics — the shop for cosmetics. Buy, activate, deactivate.
- /leaderboard/week — top 25 earners over the last 7 days. Respects the "exclude me from leaderboards" setting in your profile preferences.
- /admin/economy (admin only) — circulation, Gini coefficient, 3-month flow, 30-day earn and sink bars, anomaly flags for users earning well above the weekly median.
Role multipliers (legacy)
Mods earn 1.25×, admins 1.5×, super admins 2× on the legacy earn sources (posting, uploads, friend-accept, daily login, referrals, 2FA). The newer community earns — upvotes, best-answer, helpful report, staff pick, welcome reply, crosspost, first-post-of-day — are flat across roles so caps stay predictable.
The short version
Participate, help, upvote good posts, report the bad ones. Credits show up. Spend them on the file you wanted, the tip for the user who unblocked your week, or the border that makes your posts look like they're wrapped in a pixel frame. If nothing appeals, fine — the charts still tell you where your credits came from and where they went.
