The clock is part of the game

I can't find a single decent article on how the clocks work here and I'm tired of reading through forums to try to find answers to my questions. Very simply chess.com does a great job of making even the basic rules of chess easily accessible but it does not explain how the game is implemented here. I'm looking at a screen of "Challenges" and a bunch of green dots blipping and have just a very general notion of what they mean based on my short experience playing here. Neither axis is labeled but it was pretty clear to me at least that the vertical one is for ratings (which quite frankly also needs an article). After a bad start I've realized the horizontal axis has something to do with time and I would guess based on an average length game since, as I've learned, there are actually two time settings, initial time and bonus time, which pop up when you hover over the dots and are also unlabeled, which show in game lists under a single column "Time", and which are actually specified in different units (minutes and seconds, respectively) also unlabeled. I literally just now realized that the green dots are rated and the green rings are unrated, which I guess is supposed to be obvious from the single letter "u". As far as I can tell none of this is spelled out when you're actually in the game itself, so if you miss the info hovering the green dots (because just catching a game is sort of a minigame in itself) then you kind of have to have a second eye on the clock to figure out what it's doing, which is really the only transparent way to realize what bonus time means and the only way I know of to figure out what it's set to. And if you reply to this thread saying, "You can see the way the game is set up by clicking on such-and-such tab", then you're really missing my point. There are too few labels, too many abbreviations, a lot of assumption that the meaning of some seemingly random numbers, and no key nor popup or even articles, at least not under the "Learn" menu, to clarify the meaning.

I think you'd have a much easier time just clicking "New Game", and letting the site pair you automatically. You can set the time controls you prefer in the tab that pops up; and that part at least is pretty clear and intuitive.

Thank you for your reply. You may be right that "New Game" is clearer, and in fact it helps to guess at the meaning of some of the other elements. It still doesn't explain what "Bonus Time" means though. It could be, for instance, the minimum time gauranteed for a move when the time is low, not added throughout the game, rather only used as a threshold near the end. It could be the time allotted for each move before the clock starts ticking down, instead of being added directly to the clock (so that if you move faster than that, the time isn't accumulated). It could be an additional time allowed for the current move once the limit has passed (assuming there's a time limit on each move, which there isn't, but how would you know?) after three of which you forfeit the game. Right now the only real way to learn what it means, besides sifting through forum threads, is to guess and to hope you guess right, or otherwise the first few games will not be paced very well.