FreeBattle.lol is a public leaderboard of products. Anyone can add an entry, anyone can vote on any entry, and the rank is the difference between the thumbs up and the thumbs down. Adding costs nothing and voting costs nothing, because a board where votes cost money is not a board, it is an auction.
Pay-to-rank boards work, briefly and well: the money is real, the leaderboard is honest about what it measures, and the first day is spectacular. Then the top position reaches a number nobody will beat, the bidding stops, and the board freezes with whoever had the deepest pocket sitting on it. What is left is an expensive advertisement that calls itself a ranking.
A vote has a different failure mode, and we would rather have that one. It can be gamed, and we say exactly how well we defend against it in the rules. But nobody can end the game by writing a large enough cheque, so the top of the board keeps moving.
Twenty sponsor cards, ten in each column, sold at a flat rate and shown on every page. They never touch the ranking and they never will: an advertiser buys attention next to the board, not a place on it. If you want one, see advertise.
An anonymous identifier in a cookie, so your vote sticks to you across a reload. A salted hash of your IP address, used only to cap how fast votes and submissions can arrive from one place. No raw IP address is ever written down, and there is nothing else: no analytics scripts, no third-party trackers, no account, no email address.
When an entry is submitted, we read the page's own meta description once and store it. Nothing else is fetched, and it is never fetched again.