Community Standards
Effective: 2026-07-24
Why this document exists
This document is enforced alongside the Terms of Service. For most of history, dating had witnesses. You met people through family, friends, school, and work, and how you treated someone followed you. If you courted someone and vanished without a word, your reputation suffered. If you juggled three people while pretending to be exclusive, the community saw it. If you showed up to every gathering collecting admiration and never committing to anyone, people talked. The witnesses enforced decency not through rules but through visibility. Bad behavior was expensive because the people watching were the same people you needed to trust you. Modern dating apps removed the witnesses and made bad behavior free. No community, no memory, no consequences. You can ghost someone on Tuesday, match with someone new on Wednesday, and nobody knows. You can run a rotation of five people, tell each one they are special, and the platform not only allows it but encourages it because more conversations means more engagement means more revenue. The apps are not broken. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do, which is keep you swiping, and the behaviors they produce are the intended output of that architecture, not a flaw in it. Cards Up puts the witnesses back. That is the entire premise. Verified faces, visible reply rates, a one-message-per-person-per-day rule, no swiping, no pay-for-visibility, and no ranking algorithm. The structure itself enforces most of what other platforms only promise. This document covers the rest. The behaviors we act on, what we act with, and what happens when we do. We do not police attitudes, preferences, or private conversations. We act on behavior that leaves a record.
1. Be who you say you are
Every face on Cards Up is checked by a person against a live pose challenge. That is the foundation everything else stands on. If the face is fake, nothing else matters. The following are treated as the most serious violations on this platform and result in an immediate ban with no warning: • Using photos that are not you, including AI-generated or heavily altered images presented as real • Impersonating another person • Lying about your age • Creating an account for someone else, or operating more than one account • Swapping in a face photo that defeats your verification after passing the initial check. Any face photo change triggers re-verification automatically. Gaming this is a violation. Identity fraud is a ban, not a warning. There is no second chance on being a real person. Re-verification is required every six months. People change. Hair goes, weight shifts, skin moves. A verification at signup does not protect someone whose appearance has changed significantly since they joined. Every photo on your profile carries a timestamp showing when it was uploaded so that anyone viewing your card can calibrate for themselves whether what they are seeing reflects what they would meet in person. This is not surveillance. It is honesty about what you look like now versus what you looked like when you signed up.
2. Your record is part of your profile
Cards Up shows reply rates, response behavior, meet reliability, and progression patterns on your card. This is deliberate and it is not negotiable through support requests. We will not hide, reset, or launder your stats. Declining or ignoring a first message is always allowed and is exactly what the stats are for. They exist so patterns are visible, not to force anyone to answer. Attempting to manipulate stats through self-messaging schemes, coordinated inflation, or deleting and recreating accounts to reset a record is a violation. Recreating an account to escape your record is treated the same as identity fraud under section 1. Your stats include: Reply rate. How many counted incoming requests received an answer or a polite pass. A new request gets a grace period while you may be away; a sustained session in the app after it arrives makes it count sooner. The record separately shows requests never opened and requests opened but left unanswered. Nobody is required to say yes. Everybody is capable of saying no kindly. Meet reliability. When two users schedule a meet through the app and one does not show up without notice, that is trackable. In a village, if you agreed to meet someone at the square and did not show up, people knew. The app remembers the same way. A pattern of no-shows or last-minute cancellations is visible on your card. Life happens, and a single missed meet is not a violation. A pattern is. Progression patterns. How often your conversations move from chat to real-world meetings, and how often those meetings progress beyond a first date. Someone who messages constantly but never meets is a pen pal or a validation farmer, and that is now visible. Someone who meets frequently but never progresses past a first date is running a circuit, and that is visible too. The stats do not lie, and the community calibrates its own standards based on what the numbers show. Reciprocal effort. In every conversation, the app can see who is initiating and who is responding. If one person sends fifteen messages and the other sends two, that pattern is visible on the card as a general tendency, not as a specific conversation. In genuine courtship, effort is reciprocal. When it is not, the imbalance should be visible. Chat closure rate. When you find someone and want to focus on them, you close your other chats. This is a one-tap action the app provides. How often you close chats to focus on one person versus how often you keep multiple chats active simultaneously is visible. Someone who never closes chats is maintaining a roster. Someone who closes chats every three days and reopens new ones the next morning is cycling. The stat does not punish. It reveals.
3. Good faith
Good faith is the foundation of this community, and it is defined here so that everyone understands what it means and so that moderators have a standard to measure behavior against. Good faith means you are on this app to meet a person for a relationship. It means you read profiles before messaging. It means you respond to messages you receive, even if the response is a decline. It means you meet people you connect with rather than keeping them in chat indefinitely. It means you show up when you say you will. It means you close other chats when you find someone you want to focus on. It means your stated intent reflects your actual behavior. Good faith does not mean you must commit to the first person you meet. It does not mean you cannot explore multiple connections before deciding. It means that every interaction you have on this platform is oriented toward the possibility of a real relationship with a real person in the real world. If your behavior does not match that orientation, you are not here in good faith, and the community has a right to see that.
4. Honest intent
When you create your account, you declare your intent. Marriage. Serious relationship. Open to casual. That declaration is visible on your card. It is not a tag you swap weekly. Changing your intent requires a reason, and the change is logged on your profile history. If you declare marriage intent and your behavior looks like hookup seeking, that contradiction is on your card. If you declare serious relationship and your pattern shows you never meet anyone, never close chats, and never progress past first messages, the community can see the gap between what you said and what you are doing. Feigning intent to attract a certain caliber of person while behaving according to a different agenda is a violation, and when the records confirm the pattern, it is actionable.
5. The behaviors we will not host
This section names specific behaviors directly because the people experiencing them deserve to see them named directly. Vague language about "inappropriate conduct" protects the people doing it, not the people experiencing it. Attention farming. Using the app for ego maintenance rather than connection. Collecting messages, collecting admirers, collecting proof of desirability, and never meeting anyone. The person whose inbox is full but whose meet rate is zero is not dating. They are extracting validation from real people who are here looking for a real partner, and that is a form of exploitation. A profile that exists to harvest attention rather than to connect with a person is a violation. The deceptive profile. This is the one that modern dating apps have completely surrendered to, and we are not surrendering. The profile that presents as genuine, warm, approachable, looking for something real. Candid photos, thoughtful bio, all the right signals. Meanwhile the person behind it is running a rotation, entertaining multiple partners, and only granting access to a narrow tier of users they consider elite enough to deserve their time. The profile is a storefront. The behavior behind it is a factory. The men and women who write to this person in genuine good faith are being used as props in a validation performance they were never invited to audition for. This is disgusting behavior. It is deception at the core level of what the app is for, and when there is sufficient evidence of it, the account is banned. Zero tolerance. The evidence is in the records. Reply patterns, meet patterns, chat closure patterns, and progression data tell the full story. You cannot fake a profile and run a rotation on a platform where every behavior leaves a visible trace. Social media funneling. Using Cards Up to grow an Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media following. The match is not a potential partner. It is a potential follower. The person on the other end is here looking for a relationship and is being converted into a number on a different platform. This is pure exploitation, and it is rampant on every other dating app because those apps do not care why you are there as long as you are there. We care. Bios cannot contain links or social handles. Funneling people to external platforms in chat is reportable. If someone is here to collect followers rather than a partner, they are not here in good faith, and the account will be removed. Roster rotation. Maintaining multiple active romantic connections simultaneously while presenting yourself to each one as invested and exclusive. This is not dating. This is portfolio management applied to human beings, and it is produced by architectures that make simultaneous communication costless. The one-message-per-person-per-day rule and the chat closure visibility make this behavior visible on Cards Up, and when the pattern is confirmed through records, it is a violation. You do not need to commit to the first person you talk to. You do need to be honest about the fact that you are talking to other people, and you do need to close chats when you find someone you want to focus on. Deliberate concealment of a parallel rotation while presenting exclusivity to individuals is deception, and it is actionable. Ghosting. The silent disappearance. No decline, no closure, no explanation. On every other platform this is costless because there is no community to witness it. On Cards Up, your reply rate captures the pattern. We do not ban people for ghosting. We make the behavior visible so that the community can evaluate it. The decline button exists so that ghosting is unnecessary. A one-tap "pass with grace" removes the friction of rejection for both sides. Use it. Breadcrumbing. Sending just enough messages to keep someone interested without any intention of ever meeting. One message every few days, just enough warmth to prevent them from moving on. This is roster management, and on Cards Up it is visible through the progression pattern stat. If your conversations never move from chat to meeting, the community can see that. Pen pal syndrome. Weeks of conversation with no progression toward meeting. The app includes time-bound conversations. If a conversation does not progress toward a meeting within a reasonable window, it expires. This is not a punishment. It is structural pressure toward real-world action. If you are interested, you meet. If you are not interested enough to meet, you are not interested enough to keep someone on the hook for six weeks of chat. The expiration forces honesty about intent. Love bombing and vanishing. Intense initial interest, rapid escalation, deep sharing, future faking, followed by sudden withdrawal. This is either emotional manipulation or a dopamine crash, and neither is an excuse. The pattern is visible in the chat closure data. Someone who opens intense conversations and closes them abruptly every few days is producing a recognizable signature, and it will be visible on their card. Sexual escalation pressure. Pushing toward sexual content or hookups within the first few messages. This is not just crude. It is a filtering strategy designed to find vulnerable people quickly. On a platform where intent is declared and visible, someone claiming marriage intent while pushing for sexual content in the opening messages is contradicting their own declaration, and that contradiction is reportable. Manufactured ambiguity. "I don't know what I want." "Let's just see where this goes." "I'm not ready for anything serious." These statements are designed to maintain maximum optionality while extracting maximum intimacy. On Cards Up, your intent is declared on your card. If your declared intent is marriage or serious relationship and your chat behavior is ambiguous, evasive, or noncommittal, that gap is visible. The ambiguity engineer does not survive on a platform where the record shows what you said versus what you did. Exploitative dating. Going on dates for free meals, free drinks, free experiences, or social access without any genuine interest in the person. This is trackable through meet frequency alongside progression patterns. Someone who meets frequently, always lets the other person pay, and never progresses past a first date is running a specific exploit. The community can see the pattern. Last-minute cancellation patterns. Repeatedly scheduling dates and canceling. This is power behavior. The canceller is demonstrating that their time is more valuable and that the other person will tolerate being deprioritized. The meet reliability stat captures this. A single cancellation is life. A pattern is a behavior. Monkey branching. Lining up the next partner before leaving the current one. If you are in a relationship, you do not belong on this app. If you are using Cards Up to secure your next connection while still with someone, that is a violation regardless of whether the person on the other end knows you are attached. The undercut. Subtle early insults designed to lower someone's confidence and make them more pliable. "You're cute for a short guy." "You're actually funny, most people on here aren't." This is manipulation, and it is reportable. Coordinated group behavior. Friends daring each other to message someone as a joke. Groups sharing a profile and taking turns running the account. Going on a date just to get a story for a group chat. These behaviors violate the good faith premise the app is built on. The face is real, the verification passes, but the interaction is not genuine. This is coordinated inauthentic behavior, and it is distinct from individual misconduct. It is a violation.
6. Married and partnered users
Being on Cards Up while in a committed relationship without disclosure is a ban. We cannot verify relationship status the way we verify faces, but when it is reported and confirmed, the account is removed. Someone hiding a spouse is committing identity fraud of a different kind. The person on the other end is investing real time and emotion into someone who is structurally unavailable, and the community deserves to know that this is treated as the serious violation it is.
7. Basic decency and safety
The following are not tolerated. Escalating consequences apply unless noted otherwise: • Harassment, insults, or continued contact after someone has clearly disengaged, declined, or blocked you • Sending unsolicited explicit images. This is not lumped under general sexual advances. It is a specific, deliberate act of sexual aggression disguised as flirtation, and it is an immediate ban. Every person who has used a dating app knows the difference between an advance and an assault. This platform does too. • Sexual advances toward someone who has not welcomed them. This is distinct from unsolicited explicit images and is treated as a strike with escalating restrictions. • Threats, blackmail, or sharing private content or information without consent. Immediate ban, and where the law requires, a report to authorities. • Harassment or retaliation that originates on Cards Up and extends to other platforms. If someone blocks you here and you find them on Instagram to continue the harassment, your account on Cards Up is banned regardless of where the behavior continued. • Soliciting money, promoting products or services, or linking off-platform for commercial reasons. • Being under 18, or making advances toward anyone under 18 anywhere. Immediate ban and report. • Automated accounts, scripted messaging patterns, or accounts operated by people other than the verified face even if the face is real. This covers scam rings that hire someone to pass verification and then run the account from a different location. Automation and third-party operation are violations. • Location spoofing. Your location must reflect where you actually live or spend significant time. Creating a profile for a city you are visiting for a weekend and then leaving damages the local community structure the app is built on. Spoofing or temporary use for travel hookups is a violation.
8. Reports, strikes, and bans
Reports are reviewed by a person alongside the records. Verification history, message metadata, meet confirmations, and prior strikes are all considered together. One accusation without records is not a ban. We punish patterns, not moods. • One credible report of a pattern earns a strike and a written warning that names the specific behavior and the specific rule violated. • Single serious incidents that are not safety violations but warrant action, such as a first offense of harassment or a single instance of deceptive behavior, can earn a strike without requiring a demonstrated pattern. The current structure jumps from pattern-based strikes to immediate bans for safety violations. This middle ground exists for behavior that is serious enough to act on immediately but not serious enough to ban. • Strikes restrict features before they remove accounts. The restriction is stated plainly to the account holder. No shadowbanning, no silent throttling. You are told what you lost and why. • Bans are for identity fraud, safety violations, unsolicited explicit images, confirmed deceptive profile behavior under section 5, or confirmed repeated patterns after warning. • False or retaliatory reporting is itself a strike. Weaponizing the report system to punish someone who declined you is a violation, and the records make it easy to identify. Appeals. Reply to the enforcement notice. A person reads it. If we were wrong, we say so and clear the strike. If the records confirm the behavior, the strike stands.
9. What we promise back
• No ranking algorithm decides who sees you. Nobody can pay to be shown above you. Every user has equal distribution. • Your exact location never leaves the server. • Private lifestyle answers stay private. They filter without being shown. • Enforcement uses records, not surveillance. Nobody is reading your chats absent a report. • Every enforcement action names the specific behavior and the specific rule. No vague references to "community guidelines." If you are being restricted or removed, you are told exactly what you did. • Your data is deleted when you leave. If you delete your account voluntarily or you are banned, your verification data is removed. Your message history persists on the other person's end because those are their conversations, but your profile, photos, and stats are gone.
10. What this app is for
Modern dating culture treats marriage as something you get to eventually after years of dating, exploring, and rotating through partners. That is not what this app is for. Dating someone for five or ten years without marrying them is not more respectable than hooking up. It is the same behavior with a longer timeline and a more comfortable excuse. You are still using someone for companionship, intimacy, and convenience without committing to build a life with them. The only difference is that long-term dating without marriage sounds more responsible than casual sex, so people feel less guilt about it. But the structural outcome is identical. Someone is investing years of their life in a connection that is never going to become what they were told it might become. Cards Up exists to normalize marriage. Not as a checkbox you eventually get to. As the point. The app is for people who are looking for a person to build a life with, and who are willing to say that out loud. If that is not what you are looking for, there are dozens of other apps that will serve you exactly what you want. This is not one of them. That does not mean you must marry the first person you meet. It means that the orientation is clear from the start. Everyone here is moving in the same direction. The behaviors this document prohibits are the behaviors that emerge when people are moving in different directions and pretending they are not. When everyone is oriented toward the same thing, most of those behaviors become irrelevant, because the people who practice them self-select out of a community that does not serve them. The bet behind all of this is simple. When identity is real, records are visible, volume is capped, and the community is oriented toward marriage, most people behave the way they always did when their village was watching. The rules above exist for the few who need more than a village watching. The structure exists so that the village is always watching, and the watch is not surveillance. It is memory. The community remembers what you did, and on Cards Up, so does the app.