Rules and fair play
The exchange only works if every placement can be trusted to run its term. These are the rules that make that true. All of them are enforced automatically and shown to you openly on the page — nothing here is applied silently.
There are six rules. Read the first one twice; the rest follow from it.
1. The 24-hour promise
Every placement stays up for its full 24 hours, then the bot removes it.
This is the exchange's one non-negotiable promise, and it protects you on both sides: the ads you host come down on time, and the ads you run stay up their full term everywhere.
Breaking the promise means removing a hosted placement before its time. In practice that is one of two things:
- deleting the bot's post yourself, or
- demoting or removing the bot so it can no longer manage the placement.
Both are detected, and both are attributed to the host account.
If an ad in your channel genuinely has to go, use Hosted ads → Refuse on the channel row. The ad comes down immediately, never returns to that channel, and costs you nothing — no reliability, no strike. Turning on Review ads stops anything posting without your approval in the first place. Neither carries any penalty. See Refusing an ad and Reviewing ads before they post.
What an early removal costs
When a placement is removed early and the removal is attributable to you, four things happen:
- A reliability penalty. Your account reliability score takes a hit. Reliability is one score across all of Onflow Ads — see the full breakdown at https://onflowads.com/telegram/dashboard/reliability.
- A strike and a cooldown. The exchange pauses for your account — both hosting and running ads. The page says so honestly: a "Your exchange is paused" banner appears with the exact end time and your strike count, for example "Strike 1 of 3".
- Suspension on repeated strikes. Reaching the strike threshold shown on the banner suspends your channels from the pool for a longer period. A suspended channel shows a Suspended badge with the date it lifts. Suspensions lift automatically; once one has been served, re-enrolling the channel clears the badge. Re-enrolling never shortcuts an active suspension.
- No reward. A placement that did not run its term earns no credits and no reliability bonus.
What reduced reliability does to your reach
| Reliability score | Share of your plan's placements your ads receive |
|---|---|
| 7.5 and above | 100% |
| 5.0 to 7.4 | 75% |
| 4.0 to 4.9 | 50% |
| Below the exchange floor | The exchange is closed to the account until the score recovers |
The exchange's minimum reliability is shown on the page, alongside the other product gates on the reliability dashboard. The haircut applies to your whole placement count, including placements bought with credits or money — no purchase buys out of it.
You earn reliability back the way everyone builds it: hosting placements that run their full term. Each clean run rewards both parties.
Grace for genuine accidents (paid plans)
Paid plans forgive a number of accidental early removals per 30-day cycle — 1 on Lite, rising to 5 on Ultimate. A forgiven removal costs no reliability and no strike.
The hub shows your allowance and what is left: "Your plan forgives 3 accidental early removals per cycle — 2 left this cycle. Genuine accidents won't cost you reliability or a strike."
Two limits on grace:
- The advertiser is still told honestly that their exposure was cut. Grace protects your standing, not their numbers.
- Grace never covers demoting or removing the bot. That breaks the machinery every guarantee in the exchange stands on, and it is always penalised in full.
2. Classify your ad honestly
- Your ad's topic and level must be truthful. Every ad is reviewed by a human before it runs, and a mislabelled ad is declined.
- Some topics force a minimum level. A gambling ad runs at level 4 or above wherever you would have put it. The form tells you as soon as you pick the topic: "This topic runs at level 4 or above, so only channels that opted in to it carry it."
- Sensitive content only reaches channels that opted in. Levels 3, 4 and 5 (finance, gambling, adult) are only ever placed in channels whose owners explicitly accepted them.
- Adult content is an island. Level-5 ads run only in channels that opted into level 5, and adult topics never spill into neighbouring topics through relevance matching.
The reason is simple: a host who agreed to carry "general and education" must be able to trust that they will not wake up to a casino ad.
3. Telegram links only
All buttons and links in exchange ads must point at Telegram. No external websites, ever.
This is enforced at submission — a non-Telegram link is refused with "Button links must point at Telegram" — and it is part of the guarantee every host relies on: a placement can never drag their subscribers to an arbitrary site.
4. Respect anonymity — and its one exception
- Advertisers see totals only — placements, views, clicks — never the channels that carried their ad.
- Hosts see the ad content they carry, of course, but never the advertiser's identity.
- The one exception is a Swap, which is disclosed 1:1 by design: you and your partner see each other's creatives in each other's channels, because you both opted into exactly that.
Do not try to use the exchange to unmask the other side. There is deliberately no view anywhere on the platform that joins the two, and even the Developer API withholds the one field that would let a caller confirm which channels are enrolled.
5. One account, one Telegram — and one owner per channel
- Each Onflow Ads account pairs with exactly one Telegram account.
- A channel can be enrolled by exactly one account. Trying to enrol a channel someone else has enrolled returns "That channel is already enrolled in the exchange by another account."
- You must be an administrator of a channel to enrol it. Ownership is verified against Telegram at every enrolment, so enrolling a channel you do not administer is impossible.
6. Cancelling and leaving are never loopholes
- Cancelling an ad stops future placements; anything live finishes its 24 hours.
- Withdrawing a channel stops new placements; anything live finishes its 24 hours.
Both actions are always available and never penalised. They simply cannot be used to cut a running placement short — the hold applies to everyone equally, including you.
The legitimate exits, in one place
If you ever feel the only way out is to delete a post, one of these is what you actually want:
| You want to | Do this | Penalty |
|---|---|---|
| Get one specific ad out of your channel now | Hosted ads → Refuse | None |
| Approve everything before it posts | Review ads: On | None |
| Stop this channel receiving ads | Leave on the channel row | None |
| Stop one of your own campaigns | Cancel on the ad row | None |
| Change what content your channel accepts | Re-run Add a channel for it and pick a new level | None |
| Delete the bot's post by hand | Never do this | Reliability, a strike, a cooldown, and possibly a suspension |
If you think a decision was wrong
- A declined ad can be appealed once. Click Appeal on the ad row and give the reviewer a sentence or two. See Running ads.
- A reliability or standing question is answered on the reliability dashboard, which shows the full breakdown of how your score was built.
Edge cases worth knowing
- Enforcement is symmetrical. A cooldown pauses hosting and advertising together, so being a good advertiser cannot offset being an unreliable host, and the reverse is equally true.
- Suspensions and cooldowns lift on their own. There is nothing to apply for and no way to shorten them.
- An account under review elsewhere on Onflow Ads cannot start a new exchange campaign. Placements already running are untouched.
- A refused or declined placement is not a penalty for anyone. The host does not lose standing for refusing, and the advertiser does not lose standing for being refused.
- Grace resets with each 30-day cycle, and the hub always shows how much is left.
Next: FAQ and troubleshooting — quick answers to the questions and problems that come up most.