Frequently asked questions

A place where you leave a single 50-character sentence — once in a lifetime. You cannot edit it. You cannot delete it. Just one sentence, for whoever comes after.

One person — a sole proprietor. No investors, no advertisers, no tracking cookies. The operator's full legal contact information is published in the Commercial Disclosure page.

Most of the internet asks you to speak loudly, often, and quickly. Cairn asks you to speak only once, and carefully. The question is simple: if the person coming after you could read a single sentence of yours, what would it be?

To cover operations and to fund the donation pool. After payment processing fees, server costs, and operator compensation, 50% of net revenue is donated to named charities. See the "Money" section of About.

Wages and prices vary widely between countries, so paying $3 means very different things in different places. Paying $3 from Tokyo feels different from paying $3 in a country where it equals a meaningful share of a month's income.

So Cairn uses two tiers ($3 and $1) to keep the burden of writing roughly equal wherever you are. The $1 tier is not "lesser" — it's simply the price that makes writing feel comparable from those regions.

Yes. Registration is rejected if your email, real name, or payment-card fingerprint matches a previous entry on any axis.

Asking someone else to write on your behalf (proxy submission) is also prohibited by the Terms.

That is intentional. Brevity forces the line that actually matters. If you want to write more, somewhere else is the right place.

Anyone, anywhere, no account required. Beside the entry you'll see your display name (you choose: real name / pen name / anonymous), year of birth, country, and the date you wrote.

Your real name, email, payment info, and IP address are never public.

A 32-character hex token (e.g. 8F3C-2A91-7E4D-B068-1F5A-9C26-D437-E058) issued to you when your stone is laid. Only you know it. It is the key that lets you return six months later to vote on how the donation pool is split.

It cannot be re-issued. You won't be able to vote in the half-yearly ledger. The entry itself remains.

The proof key is shown on the success page and sent to your email. Save it somewhere safe — a password manager or a paper note.

Don't. Anyone who has your proof key can vote in your place at the half-yearly ledger. Combined with your real name, it lets them impersonate you.

The operator selects a set of recipients across diverse missions — humanitarian medicine, refugee protection, knowledge preservation, digital rights, and other registered non-profits. Writers then decide how the pool is split among them by vote.

Mechanism: every six months, each writer allocates 0–100 across the recipients (summing to 100). The donation pool is split proportionally to the sum of all allocations — not majority vote, so minority preferences are reflected in full.

The full list with descriptions is on the About page under "Where donations go". Recipients are reviewed every six months; any changes are announced in advance on the transparency page.

After the operator publishes a half-yearly report, voting opens for a window (typically two weeks to a month). Within the window, you can recast as many times as you like — only your last vote counts.

Yes. Every six months on the transparency page: number of entries, gross revenue, fees, server costs, donation pool, per-recipient share, and actual amount sent.

Guardians may submit a proxy entry for a child aged 15 or younger. The display reads "[country] [year]'s child, submitted by [guardian]". Details in Terms §10.

In principle, entries cannot be deleted. Under specific conditions, with the operator's approval, deletion is possible for a $100 fee (once per lifetime). See Terms §11.

Deletion does not free up the page number for anyone else — the page remains as "(retracted)".

The operator commits to making reasonable efforts to preserve entries in a permanently accessible form (e.g., Internet Archive, donation to national libraries). Even if c4irn.net disappears, the goal is for your sentence to remain readable from another archive.

A digital fingerprint of your entry text. Changing even one character changes the hash entirely. By comparing against a third-party archive, anyone can verify the entry has not been altered.

Contact details are at the bottom of About. Reach out anytime.