Delivery Monitoring and Your Reliability
The marketplace's promise to advertisers is that delivery is witnessed, not taken on trust — which is exactly why advertisers pay marketplace prices for your channel instead of haggling in direct messages. This page explains what the monitoring bot does with your delivered posts, precisely what does and does not trigger a flag, what a flag costs, and the reliability score all of it feeds.
What the monitor checks
From the moment a booking is marked delivered until its promised duration has run, the monitoring bot repeatedly visits your post and checks two things:
- The post still exists. A post deleted before its promised duration is a broken placement.
- The post is still pinned during the hours the format promises at the top. This applies to the numbered formats, where the promise is exact — a "2h top" placement should be the pinned message for its first two hours. For the named formats, the monitor checks existence only.
How often it checks depends on the advertiser's plan, from hourly up to every few minutes on the top plans.
The monitor is deliberately conservative
A false flag would cost you reliability and hold money you had earned, so the bar to flag is proof, not suspicion:
- A network blip, a rate limit, or any reading the bot could not complete never flags you. Those are simply retried on the next pass.
- Only a definite unpin of the ad itself counts. Pinning another message above your ad does not flag you — the ad is still pinned.
- A link the monitor cannot parse — a private-channel link, or a hand-typed address — is skipped rather than guessed at.
- A flag fires once per placement. One failure, one penalty.
What a flag does
If the monitor finds the post deleted, the channel unreachable, or the ad unpinned during its promised top-window:
- Both parties are notified. Yours reads "A placement was flagged automatically" and names the problem: for example "The ad was unpinned before its promised 2h at the top of the channel." It links straight to your bookings queue.
- Your payout is paused — never reversed. The funds stay in escrow until the matter is resolved or the advertiser confirms anyway. Trying to claim shows "We've flagged a problem with this placement — the payout is paused until it's resolved. Re-post the ad or contact support."
- Your reliability drops by 1.50.
- Any good-faith deposit on the booking is forfeited to the advertiser if the failure stands — to the injured party, not to the platform.
- The advertiser is told their funds are still held and that they can raise a concern.
Once the promised duration has fully run, monitoring stops and you are free to remove the post.
Check two things first: that @OnflowAdsBot is still an admin of your channel — removing it makes the channel unreadable to the monitor — and that the ad stayed pinned for its promised window. Then contact support from the flag notification, or re-post the ad.
Delivery metrics
On the same visits, the monitor samples the post's real views, forwards and reactions, plus clicks through Onflow Ads's tracked links. Samples are taken on a ladder of ages that is dense in the first hours and sparse later — because view counts are steeply front-loaded, and evenly spaced samples would spend most of their effort re-measuring a flat tail.
That builds the delivery report both sides see on the booking: delivered views, delivered against promised as a percentage, real cost per thousand views, and click-through rate. A number the monitor could not measure is shown as absent — never as a fabricated zero.
These witnessed numbers are also what powers your Performance Passport (see Promoting your listing) and what a guaranteed-views placement settles against.
Verified Delivery Insurance — the flip side
Advertisers on higher plans have insured placements: when the monitor flags a failure, the buyer is refunded automatically without opening a dispute. For you as the owner the consequences are exactly the same as any flag — the reliability penalty and the forfeited good-faith deposit — and nothing more. You are not charged for the buyer's goodwill credit, and one failure still means one penalty.
The proof archive
At delivery, the agreed creative (the caption plus a manifest of the booked media) and your live post link are frozen into an append-only, cryptographically signed proof archive. Every later monitor visit can append a live capture, flagged if the content has drifted from what was booked. Both parties of a placement see the same frozen trail — which is what a dispute is argued over, instead of screenshots and recollection.
Because the archive detects edits, keep the delivered post identical to the booked creative. Editing an ad after posting reads as content drift on the proof trail.
Full detail on how the archive is created is in Submitting proof of delivery.
Your reliability score
Every Onflow Ads account has one reliability score, from 0 to 10, shared across every product. Everyone starts at 8.0. It moves only on concrete events.
One score, every product. The chips underneath are the floors each marketplace requires — Paid Promotions needs 4 or more before you can accept a booking.
The events that move it on the selling side:
| Event | Change |
|---|---|
| Completed a placement cleanly (owner) | +0.20 |
| Let a booking offer expire unanswered ("ghosting") | −0.30 |
| Accepted but did not post within the window, when the cause was yours | −1.00 |
| Monitor flagged the post (removed early, or not kept on top) | −1.50 |
| A fraud concern against you was upheld | −2.00 |
Two things that are not penalties: a missed window caused by a platform or Telegram failure, and a make-good paid out on a view guarantee. Neither touches your score.
What the score affects:
- Accepting bookings requires at least 4.0. Below the floor you cannot accept new work until the score recovers — which it does through clean completions on work already in flight.
- Your effective commission can carry a small surcharge while your score is below the healthy band; at the default 8.0 the surcharge is zero, and the exact rate applied to each booking is always shown on its card.
- Your reliability is visible on your Performance Passport and on your desk, and it factors into how buyers see your channel.
The complete published rules — every penalty, every credit, the automatic healing schedules, and how to appeal a mark — live on your reliability page at https://onflowads.com/telegram/dashboard/reliability and in the Policies section of this guide.
The whole system rewards one behavior: answer every request within 24 hours (declining is free — only silence costs), post inside the window, and leave the post up and pinned for its full promised duration. Do those three things and your score only goes up.
FAQ
I was flagged but the post is still up.
Flags fire only on definite signals: the post being gone, the channel unreachable to the bot, or the ad itself unpinned during its promised top-hours. Check that @OnflowAdsBot is still an admin of your channel, and that the link you submitted points at the ad post rather than some other message. Then contact support from the flag notification.
Does the monitor see my private analytics?
No. It reads what any member of your public channel can read — that the post is there, that it is pinned, and its public view, forward and reaction counts.
Can I be flagged twice on the same booking?
No. A flag fires once per placement.
The advertiser confirmed the post anyway. Does the flag still cost me?
The confirmation can release the money, but the flag's reliability penalty is applied when the flag fires. Contact support if you believe the flag itself was wrong.
What happens after the promised duration ends?
Monitoring stops. You can delete or unpin the post freely from that point.
Next: The view guarantee — what happens when a buyer pays for a guaranteed view count in your channel.