thisisnotawebsitedotcom website

Sources: what is verified, what is claimed, and what is ours

This page is the audit trail for the whole site. It separates sources from claims from analysis, so a reader can tell which is which without reading every article's caveats. The editorial rule behind it is described on the about page.

Verified: the live artefact

Our account of what the site contains comes from loading thisisnotawebsitedotcom.com directly and recording the delivered page, styles, and asset set. Specifically confirmed by direct observation:

  • the interface is a JavaScript-dependent retro terminal with a text-entry prompt;
  • The Book of Bill branding and a triangle glyph are present in the page;
  • the page links out to the Barnes & Noble listing for The Book of Bill;
  • the served asset set includes multiple "wip"-prefixed placeholder assets covering a bubble, an art piece, a paper document, a second window, and a tooth;
  • linked stub pages exist for a note, a "cheat death" entry, an Atlantis entry, and a creature entry, alongside overlay screens for a shrine-like plaque and a computer display.

Everything on this list is a statement about what the page delivered at the time of our check, not a guarantee about future versions, since the site is evidently in an unfinished state and may change.

Verified: rights-holder sources for the franchise context

Verified: the 2016 Cipher Hunt

The franchise timeline on the homepage draws on the Wikipedia Cipher Hunt article and on Alex Hirsch's own public statements during July and August 2016, in which he organised the hunt, stated it was run at his own volition and funding without affiliation to Disney, and released the clues. That article carries maintenance flags for heavy reliance on primary sources, so we treat its fine details as slightly soft and flag that where it matters. The Bradley Pic account is a 2022 podcast recollection rather than a 2016 record.

Claimed: community reports we do not confirm

These circulate widely and we summarise them, clearly labelled, without restating them as fact:

  • that the terminal requires an initial password before accepting commands, and that the password is derivable from The Book of Bill rather than from the website;
  • that the terminal accepts a large and open-ended vocabulary of typed inputs, including character names, place names, cosmology terms, and unrelated words, returning a distinct response per input;
  • that particular strings of text unlock particular hidden responses.

We have not confirmed any of these at the source, and a published list of accepted commands is not a specification of what exists, because the terminal is open-ended by design.

Analysis: our own reading

Several things on this site are interpretation rather than reporting, and we label them in the text where they appear. The argument that the "wip" assets indicate a deliberately incomplete artefact rather than a build failure is ours. The reading that the terminal's design derives from the franchise's established ciphers is ours. The framing of the "Bill of sale" pun and the carnival-sideshow reading of Bill's design, where it appears, are ours and are labelled as analysis. None of these are presented as the creator's stated intent.

Sources we do not treat as authoritative

Fan wikis, Reddit threads, social posts, video essays, and "complete biography" or "all codes" pages are used at most as leads. None is cited for a fact here. The pattern in those sources is precisely the problem: confident specifics with no provenance, frequently copied from one another until the earliest source is untraceable.