Lexicon — the words Waidrn uses

Waidrn has its own vocabulary. This page defines the terms once, so the product, the rules and the receipts all mean the same thing when they use them. Where a term is capitalised in the interface (STAY, LEAVE), that is a button; everything else is ordinary language.

Places and people

• Waidrn — the patronage town square: one account, three rooms (Stories, Boards, Community Projects), one simulated ledger.
• The Square — the whole community: the archive, the boards and the project market together.
• The archive — the fiction side of Waidrn: works, chapters, series, fandoms and tags.
• The boards — the discussion side of Waidrn: boards, threads, posts and threadmarks.
• Creator — anyone who publishes a work, posts on the boards, or claims a project.
• Requester — the person who proposes a community project and sets its literal terms.
• Patron — anyone who backs a project with WAID, gifts a post, or keeps a work alive with power.
• Moderator — a community member with the report queue and moderation powers; every action they take is audited.
• Founder — the operator account that holds the genesis supply and funds the town square.

The archive

• Work — one published piece of fiction: its title, summary, metadata, tags and chapters.
• Chapter — one section of a work, read in the reader or as part of the entire work.
• Series — an ordered group of works that belong together.
• Fandom — the media universe a work belongs to. Real fandoms are listed as metadata; the prose on Waidrn is written by its own authors.
• Tag — a canonical label of one kind: fandom, character, relationship, freeform or genre.
• Rating — General, Teen, Mature, Explicit or Not Rated.
• Content warnings — the labels that let readers choose safely: graphic violence, major character death, non-consensual content, underage, "Chose Not To Warn", "No Warnings Apply".
• Kudos — a free, one-per-reader mark of appreciation. Not money; not a vote.
• Comment — a public reply on a work or chapter.
• Bookmark — a saved work, public or private, optionally with a note and a recommendation.
• Mark for later — a private reading list entry, separate from a bookmark.
• Subscription — a watch on a work, series, thread or project; new chapters and posts appear in your notifications.
• Reading progress — the chapter you last read in a work, remembered per account.

The boards

• Board — a category of discussion; Waidrn has a small, fixed set of them.
• Thread — a conversation inside a board, with a title and its own prefix such as WIP, REC, STORY or QUEST.
• Post — one message inside a thread.
• Quote — a reply that carries an earlier post with it.
• Like — free appreciation on a post; separate from power.
• Threadmark — a post marked as part of a serialised work, with a category (chapter, sidestory, apocrypha, media, informational, staff), a label and an order.
• Story mode — the reader that shows only threadmarked chapters of a thread, in order.
• Threadmark index — the page that lists every threadmark of a thread, grouped by category.
• Watch — a subscription to a thread; you are notified of new replies and new chapters.

The market

• Quest — a request for something that should exist: a story, a tool, art, a film, a real-world build.
• Venture — a quest a creator has claimed and is building in public.
• Commission — a project where a requester pays for a specific piece of work.
• Collaboration — a project with more than one maker, delivered together.
• Proposal — the public page for a quest: its terms, its pool and its timeline.
• Terms — the literal contract text. It is interpreted literally, not generously.
• Pool — the WAID pledged behind a project, held in escrow.
• Pledge — a patron's backing of a project. Withdrawable in full before a claim is accepted.
• Claim — a creator's proposal to deliver a project, with milestones and payout percentages.
• Milestone — one deliverable of a claimed project, with acceptance criteria, a delivery date and a payout percentage.
• Acceptance criteria — what "done" means for a milestone, written before the work begins.
• Fund target — the escrow that must remain for the next milestone to open.
• STAY / LEAVE — a patron's vote at a milestone. Staying keeps the stake in the project; leaving refunds the remaining stake in full; abstaining counts as STAY.
• Claim vote — backers accepting or rejecting a creator's claim before work starts.
• Settlement — the moment a milestone is paid from escrow to the creator and leavers are refunded.
• Receipt — the immutable public record of a settled project: parties, amounts, milestone results, deliverable links and hashes.
• Fork — a fresh proposal that continues a stalled project, with its own terms and pool.
• Creator studio — the milestone board where a creator marks deliveries, publishes artifacts and watches votes.
• Deadline — the funding deadline, or a milestone's delivery date; both are contractual.

Money, power and time

• WAID — the simulated coin the whole economy runs on. 1 WAID pegs to 1.00 simulated USD. It has no real-world value.
• Spark — the smallest unit of WAID; 1 WAID = 1,000,000 sparks. Prices and rent are calculated in sparks and displayed in WAID.
• Simulated USD — demo dollars in your wallet, used only to buy and sell WAID 1:1 inside the simulation. No deposits, no withdrawals, no real money.
• Account balance — spendable, sellable WAID: what you bought or earned.
• Loaned balance — WAID credited by the simulated mint; it can only fund power for your own posts, never gifts, pledges or sales.
• Mint — a small proof-of-work puzzle that credits a fixed amount of loaned WAID from the mint pool. The browser solves it; there is no real mining.
• Mint pool — the part of the founder supply that has decayed and is available to fund mints and buys.
• The Ledger — the double-entry, integer-sparks record of every coin movement. The total supply never changes, and /economy proves it live.
• Genesis — the single moment the fixed 1,000,000,000,000.00 WAID supply entered the founder account.
• Decay — the continuous 15%/year conversion of the founder treasury into the mint pool.
• Power — WAID staked to a post, chapter or proposal. Power pays storage rent and decays; it is the reason a post stays alive.
• Rent — the storage cost a post pays: one spark per byte per day, with a small fixed overhead.
• Author share — the percentage of each gift that goes to the author immediately; the rest becomes post power. Shown publicly; set by the author.
• Gift — a patron's WAID sent to a specific post, split by that post's author share.
• Top-up — adding power to a post or chapter to keep it alive or bring it back from grace.
• Grace period — seven days after power reaches zero during which the content is truncated but recoverable.
• Pruning — the permanent removal of a post body after grace expires; a tombstone and the public statistics remain.
• Tombstone — the visible marker left by a pruned or deleted post: title, author, dates, and a link to any receipt that references it.
• Visibility — whether a work is public, visible to signed-in readers only, or private to its author.
• Report — a flag sent to the moderation queue, available on every kind of user content.
• Moderation queue — the ordered list of open reports, worked by moderators and reviewed by admins.
• Audit log — the permanent record of privileged actions: roles, reports, moderation decisions, economy operations.

Patronage and rights (v1.4)

• Creator support (simulated) — voluntary demo WAID and the creator's own external links. Fee 0; no real payments.
• Contribution (project) — non-refundable simulated WAID added to an eligible project's pool, separate from pledges.
• Rights status — a project's declared rights stand: original / owned / licensed / consented / fanwork without a licence / rights not established. Only the first four can receive project money.
• Claim (rights holder) — a statement filed from a blocked project page by a copyright holder or authorised agent; moderators review it and an accepted claim records consent.
• Community / Organization — user-created social group / institution with a page, roles, linked boards/projects and simulated support. Organization verification is moderator-reviewed evidence, not an endorsement.