About

A game about being put on hold.

Don't Close the Tab is a deliberately boring endurance game about being put on hold. It's made by MC Software Solutions LLC.

Everyone knows the feeling: the music, the small voice saying your call is important, the fear that if you look away for one moment you'll lose your place. This game keeps the fear and removes the phone company.

Why it exists

It started as a small question: can a web page reliably get someone's attention from a hidden tab, hour after hour, when browsers are working hard to put that tab to sleep? It turned out it can, most of the time, and that's a surprisingly good game. We wrote up what we measured.

How we keep it fair

Ring times stay on the server until they fire, and scores come from the server's clock, so a score can't simply be typed in. Runs that look automated don't get a place on the boards, and the longest holds are marked provisional until someone has reviewed them. A determined cheat can still get through. There are no prizes, which removes most of the reason to try.

A note on 24 hours

The cap is a joke with a ceiling on it. Please don't lose sleep over this game. Nothing here is worth it, and that's the point.