Referral Program

How Referring Works

Your link is the site address plus /r/ plus your login, as in https://hogwartslive.com/r/yourlogin. The same link, spelled out and ready to copy, lives on the Referral Page, which also keeps your running tally. Whoever enrolls through your link is recorded as your recruit. The recording is permanent. There is no form for undoing it; there are forms for declaring things, and they are covered further down, under their own weather system.

A referral on its own pays nothing. It is an entry in a ledger. The ledger is patient.

The Milestone

When a recruit reaches level 10 with a verified owl (the site's name for your email address, verified the ordinary way at signup), a recruiter badge is filed to your profile. Once per recruit. The badge collection grows at 1, 5, and 25 genuinely converted recruits, and the office keeps the arithmetic itself, so nobody has to.

The milestone settles in heraldry, not in currency: badges cannot be spent, traded, or redeemed, which is the point. They exist so that a record of good recruiting is exactly that, and not a small industry.

The Purchase Bonus

When the same friend makes their first payment and it settles, the Bursary credits your account with a flat 250 donator points (the default; staff can adjust the rate). Once per friend. Whatever the amount they spent, the bonus is the bonus; the Bursary finds proportion undignified.

The terms, exactly:

• Once per friend. The first payment triggers it. Further Galleons from the same friend are between that friend and the Bursary, which sends thank-you notes of its own.
• After the payment settles. Not at signup, not at level 10, not when the friend says the payment is "basically done."
• At most 3 bonuses per referrer per calendar week. The week is the office's week, which starts on Monday, because the office calendar has never once been consulted about this. A fourth friend's bonus waits for staff review instead of paying, and either gets approved by a human or becomes a story.

What Never Counts

Your own accounts do not count, under any spelling. Self-referrals are declined automatically, and the office asks you not to confuse "automatically" with "not really checked."

The checks, stated plainly: the office compares the signup addresses the two accounts came from, the device fingerprints collected at signup, and the quality of the recruit's owl (certain wholesale inboxes are known to the office, as are addresses built to receive many letters at once). When the strong signals match, the referral is declined quietly, with the reason filed on the ledger row. When the signals are merely odd, the referral goes to a staff desk, where a person reads it and decides. None of this is an accusation; the ledger does not accuse, it declines, which is quieter and much harder to argue with.

Everyone who plays from the same building, the same family, or the same router as a friend is exactly who the next section was written for.

Household Declarations

A household declaration is a filing in which you state, on the record, that another account shares your household. It is made on the Referral Page under "Declare your household": hand the book the other account's login, read the terms, and confirm. The filing is complete only when they file their own half, from their own login; until then it is one signature waiting for another.

What a declaration does, both halves printed on the same page:

• The pair is exempt from the automatic checks, once both of you have filed. One signature on its own blocks referral rewards and nothing more; the exemption itself starts when the other account files its own half.
• The pair can never earn referral rewards from each other, in either direction. No badges, no bonus, and a staff approval cannot overrule it, because the declaration is the players' own and it outvotes the desk.

The book holds at most five declarations per account. It also reads the same evidence the checks read, so when the account you declared shares your browser, your device, or your owl address, it says so, politely, on the record.

A declaration can be removed, which ends the arrangement for the future and restores the ordinary checks. Referrals already declined stay declined; the ledger does not do retries. Declaring is not a loophole and is not priced like one: it trades a suspicion you might have beaten for an ineligibility you definitely cannot. And filing household declarations between accounts one person controls, to get around the referral checks, earns nothing and is a sanctionable offense. The signatures sit in a book staff reads.

Fine Print

• One badge per recruit. One bonus per friend. The ledger rounds nothing and forgets nothing.
• The weekly cap counts bonuses that actually paid, weeks starting Monday. Waiting-for-review does not count against next week; it counts as waiting.
• A declined referral stays declined. The reason travels with the row, in case anyone later asks the ledger to explain itself, which nobody ever has.
• Milestones require the recruit's owl to be verified. An unverified recruit is a rumor, and rumors file nothing.
• The program is not an income. It is a thank-you note with a treasury department attached.