How this works
This site publishes factual claims about whether other people’s websites are reachable. That deserves a stated method rather than a vibe, so here it is in full.
The check
Once a day, each tracked board gets a single HTTP request to its homepage from a bot identifying itself as DeathwatchBot/1.0. Requests are sequential with a delay between them — never parallel, never repeated within the same day. Hammering the sites being reported on would be both rude and self-defeating, since the timeouts it caused would show up as failures in this tracker’s own data.
The five statuses
- Alive — reachable, and the top-slot price has changed since a previous check. Somebody is still bidding.
- Quiet — reachable, but the top price hasn’t moved in 30 days. The site works; nobody’s using it. This is a separate status precisely because calling a working site “dead” would be false.
- Down — failed 3 consecutive daily checks. One failure is noise. Two might be a bad deploy or a certificate someone renews on Monday. Three consecutive daily misses is a pattern.
- Parked — reachable, but serving a registrar parking or domain-for-sale page. The domain lapsed. This is the clearest death signal there is, and it returns a perfectly healthy HTTP 200 — which is why status codes alone aren’t enough and the page content has to be inspected.
- Gone — set by hand, with a reason, after confirming a site is finished.
Sites can move back up. A board that returns after being marked down or parked goes straight back to alive, and the change is logged on its page like any other. A tracker that could only move one direction would be wrong over any useful length of time.
Where “On strike” fits
On strike isn’t a sixth status. Every board on that list is still, underneath, either Alive or Quiet — it’s a visibility layer on top of the real status, not a new one. It shows any board that failed its most recent check but hasn’t reached 3 consecutive misses yet, the threshold in the Down rule above. Each successful daily check removes one strike rather than clearing the whole history at once. A board leaves this list only when its strike count reaches zero. Blocked checks neither add nor remove a strike. It exists so failures never accumulate out of view — you can see exactly what’s at risk before it’s ever actually called Down.
Quiet has nothing to do with strikes
Worth saying directly, since the two are easy to conflate. Quiet is not a failure state — a Quiet board passes its check every day: fully reachable, HTTP 200, no errors. What makes it Quiet is unrelated to reachability entirely: the top price hasn’t moved in 30 days. A board can sit at Quiet for a year without ever taking a strike, and a board can be racking up strikes toward Down while its status still reads Alive, if the price moved before checks started failing. Strikes track whether a site answers. Quiet tracks whether anyone’s still bidding on it. They are measuring two completely different things: recovering to zero strikes removes the On-strike marker, but it does not change a genuinely Quiet board.
When a check proves nothing
Plenty of sites sit behind bot protection that refuses unknown crawlers outright. A 403 from a firewall, or a 429 from a rate limiter, means this bot was turned away — it says nothing at all about whether the site is working for real visitors.
Those results are recorded as inconclusive. They don’t count toward the three strikes, and they don’t reset the count either. Without this rule, every board behind a normal web application firewall would be marked down within three days while running perfectly — which would be the easiest possible way for this tracker to end up publishing false claims at scale.
Survivor Rank
Survivor Rank is a public 0–100 score for boards that are currently Alive or Quiet. It is based only on data measured by Deathwatch itself: its check history, the day it first tracked a board, and clicks through Deathwatch’s own outbound links.
The formula is: 40% Uptime + 30% Longevity + 30% Attention. Each component is first normalised from zero to one, then the result is shown as an integer out of 100. Each board page shows the components and raw inputs so an owner can recompute the score by hand.
- Uptime is successful checks divided by all checks in the last 90 days. If there are fewer than five checks in that window, all-time checks are used instead, so a one- or two-check sample is not over-read.
- Longevity is days since first tracked, capped at 90 days. The cap stops an early starter from keeping a permanent head start once newer boards have also survived a full quarter.
- Attention is Deathwatch outbound clicks on a log scale, relative to the most-clicked currently Alive board. Log scaling matters: the difference between 10,000 and 200 clicks is real, but it should not make every board under 200 look identical to zero.
The 90-day uptime window makes the rank reflect current reliability rather than a bad month long ago. The matching 90-day longevity cap prevents the score becoming a list of who arrived first. Boards that are Down, Parked, Gone, or have no completed checks show a dash instead of a score: unknown is not the same claim as zero.
Reported revenue, bids, top bids, and every other reported financial field are excluded from Survivor Rank. They are third-party, unverified claims and remain displayed separately as such. Folding them into a Deathwatch rank would make the result less trustworthy, not more.
About the prices
Peak and last top bid are best effort, but Deathwatch does not guess from the largest dollar figure on a page. That approach confuses revenue, sponsor prices and takeover caps with bids. The daily sweep now accepts only a named structured field or a site-specific label such as “Top bid”, “rank 1” or “currently worth”. Each accepted reading stores its extraction source.
Cloudflare blocks, client-only pages, and boards with multiple incomparable products stay not read — never $0 and never a number borrowed from another site. A small D beside a top bid means it was read directly by Deathwatch during a sweep. Treat it as an observed public page value, not an audited payment.
Deathwatch is the status source
Availability results, check timestamps, strikes, status-change events, Deathwatch outbound clicks and Survivor Rank are first-party Deathwatch measurements or calculations. They are published as a versioned JSON feed and status-change RSS under CC BY 4.0. The feed excludes every imported financial field so downstream users cannot mistake somebody else’s claim for a Deathwatch measurement. Feed and attribution details.
The financial columns are not ours
Deathwatch directly observes some clearly labelled public top-bid values during its daily request; those carry a D. The separately labelled Reported financial columns, plus any top bid without a D, are imported third-party claims. Deathwatch does not credit, endorse, or treat an upstream source as an authority for those figures.
Their stated method, kept intact here rather than flattened into a number:
- Reported revenue is only what a board says about itself, on its own front page or about page. Nothing is summed from bid rows and called revenue. Most boards publish nothing, which is why most of that column is a dash — a dash means no figure was published, never zero.
- Top bid is the first row of a board’s own list, not the largest number on its page, which is usually a price cap or a featured tier.
- A ~ marks a figure that was currency-converted at a hand-updated fixed rate, or auto-read rather than confirmed. Right order of magnitude, not an exact number.
None of the imported financial data is audited. Every reported figure is a self-reported claim relayed from a third party and labelled that way wherever it appears. A Deathwatch D marks only what the sweep read on the public page; it does not verify that a payment happened.
“$X paid into offline boards” is not an accusation
The headline figure adds up what offline boards said they had taken. It is worth publishing because it is the honest scale of the wave. It is not a claim that anyone stole anything, and this site will not say otherwise.
A board goes offline for ordinary reasons far more often than dishonest ones: a lapsed domain, an unpaid hosting bill, a free tier expiring, a builder losing interest after a weekend. None of that is theft, and a tracker cannot tell the difference from the outside. Where money genuinely was taken and not honoured, that is a matter for the people who paid and, if it comes to it, their payment provider or a court — not for a status column.
So the wording throughout is deliberate: boards are down, parked, or quiet. Money is reportedly paid. Nothing here is described as stolen, scammed, or rugged, because this tracker has no evidence of any of those things and publishing it anyway would be both wrong and actionable.
What this doesn’t claim
Nothing here says why a site went down, whether its operator did anything wrong, whether it made or lost money, or whether anyone was treated badly. Down means it didn’t respond. Parked means the domain lapsed. That’s the whole claim.
Conflict of interest
The person who runs this tracker also runs one of the boards on the list. It is listed, checked, and scored on exactly the same rules as every other entry, with no exemption and no special handling. A deathwatch that quietly excused its own author’s site would be worthless — being on the list is the reason to believe the rest of it.
Getting it corrected
If your board is listed wrongly — you were never down, the tracker hit you during a migration, the price is misread — write in and it gets fixed, with the correction logged on your board’s page alongside everything else. Every status change here carries a timestamp and a reason, so there’s always a record to check against rather than an argument to have.
Contact: [email protected]