RepliCounts:

To manage an existing account, enter its name or alias into the box, then click 'Manage' to get to its dashboard.

How to use this page:

• To create and manage a new administrative (secret) account, just click the Manage button above (the white box must be empty).
• That single click creates, opens, and saves your new, unique online account, and takes you to it's account owner's dashboard to manage it. You will see your new account's name (a 40-digit number, never beginning with a zero) once only on the dashboard; save a copy in a secure place, if you ever want to come back to this account later.
• That 40-digit account name is unique to you. Almost certainly no one in human history has ever seen that number before, and no one in future history ever will, unless they get it from you. Even the server does not keep and cannot reconstruct a copy; it keeps only a hashed version so that it can later authenticate you as having the 40-digit number. Your new account is entirely unique and could possibly exist forever. Don't worry; by not entering personal information you avoid any risk of identity theft.
• If you ever get stuck you can always start over by going to the the home page, www.replicounts.com. Any changes that you already made by pressing a button will remain. (There is no separate Save button, at this time.)
• Note that we highlight active links with a yellow background. If the yellow stays on for a while, that's because the network is slow (or down). If it stays yellow more than half a minute or so, try clicking again, since the request to the server or the reply may have been lost in transmission. (Note that Google Translate and Google Custom Search links may be highlighted differently, depending on your phone, browser, or other device.)
• Google Translate is fast, but it slows RepliCounts considerably when Internet connections are poor -- even if it is only downloaded but never used. On very bad connections the "Select Language" box may take many seconds to show up, or may time out (which may indicate that the Internet connection is no longer available). So we don't load Google Translate unless you request it (by clicking our language bar at the top of the home page). In that case the translation applies to every page on our site viewed by the user (except for the source code, and the Money-Innovation Search Engine). In our address bar you will see addresses ending in '/i' (i is for international), which tells RepliCounts that Google Translate is to be loaded.
• Our context-sensitive help system uses these notes (above this red line) for information you may need now to use the current screen. Notes below the red line provide related background.

Background

• Most RepliCounts users (maybe 98%) will never see this page. Instead this page will be used by musicians, journalists, and other creators selling their work -- or by their managers or agents. But the end users, including sponsors who buy prepaid downloads in bulk, will only need to click a link to reach a small public dashboard set up for them by the artists or administrator. They will never even need to know that RepliCounts exists -- reducing their learning curve to near zero.
• RepliCounts should work the same on almost any browser that reaches the Web -- on almost any phone, computer, or operating system. And it can work effectively even with poor-quality, very-low-bandwidth network connections.
• Don't worry about wasting our disk space by creating and abandoning extra accounts. Even this demo program has room to store over 100,000 of them. A production version could hold hundreds of millions of active accounts and process them rapidly (though so far we have only tested up to 25,000 accounts, with no perceptible slowing). Also, there are plenty of account names available: 9,000 billion billion billion billion (.9*10**40) different 40-digit names not beginning with zero, so we are unlikely to run out. And your administrative accounts will be hard to guess.
• For mass sponsorship at least, there is no need for a network effect (for any critical mass of users) -- no need to somehow get many people on board before mass sponsorship becomes useful to any of them. Mass sponsorship should work well, even for the first artist to use it -- greatly facilitating adoption.
• RepliCounts(tm) is a free and open-source project (using the Apache Version 2.0 License):
• RepliCounts is unconventional, because we are testing new approaches to software design. The central new idea (online financial and other accounts that can replicate) is quite different from conventional ecommerce software. It wasn't obvious how to make it work; we spent a couple years figuring out how to do so.
• For full documentation (draft, in progress -- read Introduction and Summary first), see www.RepliCounts.com/doc.

www.RepliCounts.com site last updated 2012-01-21