ProudToBe — Community Rules

The idea in one paragraph

ProudToBe is one page per real person and one honest ranking. The whole thing works only if a vote means a person chose to give it, a referral means a person really joined, and a page shows who someone actually is. Everything below follows from that.

1. Be one real person

• One human, one account, one page. If you run a brand or a project, the page belongs to the person who stands behind it.
• Use a name and a nick that are yours or that you have the right to use. Do not take the name of a known person, brand or organisation to collect their attention. Names that belong to widely known people or brands may require verification before they can be used.
• Do not pretend to be someone else, and do not let someone else run your account under your name.

2. Votes are honest choices

• You get one free vote a day. Give it to anyone you like, including yourself.
• You may buy votes and give them to anyone, including yourself. That is part of the game and it is public: a vote is a vote.
• Do not manufacture votes: no bots, no scripts, no vote exchanges run by software, no networks of accounts you control, no "click farms". Asking friends to vote for you is fine; paying strangers to create accounts and vote in a pattern is not.
• Do not sell, trade or lend votes or accounts outside the Service. Votes have no cash value and cannot change hands.

3. Referrals are real people who stayed

• Your invite link is for inviting people. A referral counts only after the new person creates a page and stays active for a few days — that is deliberate.
• Do not refer yourself, your own extra accounts, or people who exist only on paper. Do not run signup farms. These are the fastest way to lose a page.

4. Your page is about you

Publish what you want people to know: your work, your links, your images and videos, your offer. Some things are not allowed anywhere on the Service, including club pages and community links:

• illegal content, or content that facilitates something illegal;
• threats, harassment, bullying, or content that targets a person or group with hatred or contempt on the basis of who they are;
• sexually explicit content, and any sexual content involving minors in any form (this is reported to the authorities);
• content that incites or glorifies violence or self-harm;
• impersonation, fake credentials, fake endorsements, and misleading claims designed to deceive;
• other people's private information (addresses, phone numbers, documents) published without their consent;
• images, videos, music or texts you do not have the right to use — when you upload an image you confirm that you hold the rights to it;
• malware, phishing, scams, "get rich quick" schemes, and links that lead to any of these;
• spam: pages that exist only to hold links, keyword stuffing, mass-produced pages.

Ordinary commercial content is welcome: a photographer selling prints, a developer offering services, a creator with a shop. That is what the page is for.

5. Clubs

• A club is a team. Its owner decides who joins and may remove members; use that fairly, not as a way to trade favours for votes.
• The owner is responsible for the club's name, description and external community links. The content rules above apply to all of them.
• A club's external community (Discord, Telegram, a forum) is not run by ProudToBe. What happens there is between you and the club, but a club used to organise vote manipulation loses its standing here.

6. What happens when rules are broken

We keep three things apart, because they deserve different answers:

Content and conduct. A page that breaks section 4 may be hidden, suspended, removed from the ranking or closed, and images may be taken down. Honest votes that person gave to others in the past stay where they are — a rude page does not make an earlier honest vote false.

Fraud and system integrity. Fake accounts, referral farms, scripted voting and similar manipulation lead to the removal of everything the fraud produced: fake referrals, the power they generated, votes given by fake accounts. Where honest and fraudulent activity can be told apart, we reverse only the fraudulent part. An account that exists only as a tool of fraud is closed and its outgoing votes may be invalidated. Every reversal is recorded and can be audited.

Payments. If a payment is reversed (refund, chargeback, dispute), the votes it bought are removed from the pages that received them. Opening a chargeback with your bank instead of writing to us is treated as a payment integrity violation and may lead to the permanent closure of your account. Write to us first; we answer.

We aim to be proportionate: a first small mistake usually gets a message, not a ban. Deliberate manipulation does not.

7. Reporting

If you see a page, club or image that breaks these rules, use the Report action on the page (available from [date]) or write to hello@proudtobe.online with the address of the page and what you saw. We look at every report. We do not publish who reported.

8. Appeals

If your page was actioned and you think we got it wrong, write to hello@proudtobe.online from the e-mail address of your account. Tell us what happened. A person will look at it and answer.

Last updated: [date of publication].