Stamps & fanlistings

A stamp is ninety-nine pixels by fifty-six and says you are a fan of something. A fanlisting is the register that made the claim real: one volunteer keeping one list, one fanlisting per subject on earth, and your name typed into it by hand.

Codes

Take one. One click, no account, no confirmation.

Thirteen stamps, 13,832 bytes for all of them. Point at one to measure it.

Join the fanlisting

the only requirements to join a fanlisting are your name and country.

No password. No confirmation mail. No profile. Two fields, and then a person.

Name:
Country:
	Join

Members

Those twenty-four rows are invented for this plate. None of them is a real person, and no real fanlisting's member list is reproduced here.

Your affiliation is a row of hand-typed text in one stranger's file. It is slower and smaller and more fragile than a follow. It is also the only copy, and it is addressed to somebody.

Start your own

Then run the fanlisting yourself. Check the Approved FLs list first, which is the rule the whole network turns on.

Subject:
	Check the Approved FLs

Field marks

• Ninety-nine by fifty-six. Nine of the ten sampled files are exactly that. The tenth is 99 x 55, off by a single pixel, and it is listed below as measured rather than quietly normalized, because real archives contain real mistakes.
• The shape is the standard. Nothing else is. GIF, PNG and JPEG all appear at identical dimensions, where 172 of the 200 88x31 buttons this guide already ships are GIF. Sample the same edge pixel on all ten and four come back at exactly #5D615D, which is one template; two more match each other; the last four are four different things. Even the frame was only a convention.
• An animated stamp stores only what changes. Frame 0 is the whole canvas; frames 1 to 3 are sub-rectangles as small as 5 x 5. That is why an animated stamp weighs about as much as a still one.
• Filed by subject, never by color. The collection page these are modeled on has no grouping comments in it at all, while the same author's blinkies page is sorted entirely by palette. Stamps are statements; blinkies are decor.
• One fanlisting per subject, worldwide, adjudicated by volunteers. The non-compliant went on a Troubles List, and at the end of that was deletion.
• The register's own stylesheet sets h1 { display: none }. Every page in the network has a heading that nobody has ever seen. This one shows it.

What it solved

Affiliation was a relationship with a person, not a number attached to an account, and nobody could inflate it. Inflating it was against the rules, and the rules were kept by a human being who would notice.

Sources, and what is deliberately absent