Rules and Fairness
Cross-promotion only works if both sides show up — and stay up. This page collects the rules that keep swaps fair: the trust signals you see before committing, the automatic protections against no-shows, the monitor that watches a live swap through to the end, the account-standing requirements, and the plan limits — plus what money can and cannot buy.
The trust signals
Cross-promotion shows you the facts that matter at the moment of decision — on the join page's Before you commit panel, on every directory card, on requests and on the open-campaign page:
- Size verdict — Great match, Good match, Fair match or Uneven sizes, computed from both channels' subscribers and average views with the same formula everywhere on Onflow Ads. It appears wherever both channels are known.
- Track record — completed swaps, dropped swaps, a reliability percentage with a meter, and the partner's average star rating (see Ratings). New accounts read "New partner · no completed swaps yet" rather than carrying a fake score.
Completed counts campaigns that ran all the way through. Dropped counts the ones a member cancelled, declined or failed. A code that expired unjoined is nobody's broken promise, so it never counts against anyone.
These signals are free for everyone, identical on every plan, and computed the same way for every member.
Paid extras never buy trust
A few extras sit around cross-promotion. All of them buy visibility, convenience or cover — none of them touch the trust signals.
| Feature | What it buys | What it never does |
|---|---|---|
| ★ Featured directory listing | Position at the top of directory browsing, with a visible ★ Featured badge | Never changes match verdicts, track record or ratings |
| ⚡ Boost on a request | Top of the recipient's inbound queue, with a ⚡ Priority badge | Never changes whether they can or will accept |
| Campaign insurance — cover each side declares, bundled on Elite and above | The figure the party at fault declared (up to $500), moved from their wallet to their partner's by the website when the monitor's verdict lands | Never alters results, ratings or the monitor's verdict |
| External Links add-on ($1) | The ability to put non-Telegram links in your posts | Never changes reach, ranking or delivery |
And the flip side: results, match verdicts and track records are never paywalled — free on every plan, always.
Featured placement is bought on your own listing (Discovering partners); a request boost is bought on your own pending request (Partnership requests). Both prices fall with your plan and are free on Ultimate — the full table is on Add-ons and extras.
Anti-ghost protections
"Ghosting" — joining a campaign and then never confirming — wastes the creator's time and allowance. Cross-promotion handles it automatically:
- A joiner who attaches but does not confirm for 48 hours has the campaign closed out with the note "Partner didn't confirm in time".
- The creator is freed. They are told the partner went inactive, and the campaign does not count against their monthly allowance — starting a fresh one costs nothing extra.
- The joiner is warned by DM ("Please only join campaigns you intend to follow through on."), and takes a strike. At three strikes, joining is paused for 48 hours — creating your own campaigns is never blocked. The cooldown clears on its own, and the refusal names the exact reopening time.
- The joiner also loses −0.30 reliability. The same sweep that closes the campaign records a Left a CP slot unconfirmed entry (−0.30) on the one reliability score your account carries — once per campaign, however many times the sweep runs.
- The same join gate applies to accepting a partnership request and claiming a Blitz slot, since both make you a joiner.
Both consequences are decided and applied by the website: the strike and the cooldown on the join side, and the −0.30 on the score side — the same figure the open-campaign page prints in its commitment list. The innocent creator's score is untouched, and they are told so. The entry lands on your reliability ledger like any other and can be appealed from there.
The mirror-image protections for creators are the two expiry clocks: unjoined codes die at 24 hours, and neither expired nor ghosted campaigns ever cost allowance. See Campaign lifecycle.
Backstops exist on the other side of the fence too: unanswered post reviews auto-approve after 6 hours so a silent partner cannot strand a built campaign (Creatives), and pending requests expire after 72 hours (Partnership requests).
The delivery monitor
The anti-ghost clocks protect the setup. Once a swap is live, a different check takes over: the Onflow Ads bot watches that each side's post is still there, for the full run you both agreed to. This is what turns a promise into a guarantee — you are not relying on your partner's goodwill to keep their end up.
- It re-checks every live campaign every 30 minutes, from go-live until the run ends.
- The check is silent. It looks up the exact message it published; it never posts, comments, pins or messages anyone in your channel.
- It stops checking in the last few minutes before the end, because that is when the bot removes both posts itself. A legitimate takedown is never read as a broken deal.
- A check that cannot reach the post at all — access revoked, a bad minute on Telegram — is recorded as inconclusive and counts toward nothing. Only a conclusive "this message no longer exists" counts, and two consecutive conclusive ones are required before any penalty. A single successful check resets the count.
That last rule is the important one. Nobody is penalised for a transient error, and nobody escapes a deletion by cutting the bot off: an unreachable post is never a verdict, in either direction.
When a post comes down early
Removing your partner's post before the agreed end is the one thing cross-promotion genuinely punishes, because it turns a swap into a free ride: you took their reach and they lost yours.
| Who | What happens |
|---|---|
| The side that removed the post | −1.50 on the reliability score, a DM naming the campaign, and a permanent entry on the ledger. Repeat violations can lead to suspension |
| A side that left the partner's channel before the run ended | −1.00 on the reliability score — the monitor checks membership the same two-pass way it checks the post, and a leave-and-rejoin is convicted as leaving |
| The other side | Told what happened and that it has been dealt with — nothing for them to chase, and nothing counted against them. If the party at fault had declared campaign insurance cover, the website moves that declared figure from their wallet into yours |
The monitor is the Telegram bot, and it only ever records what it confirmed. The score move is applied by the website, which prices the entry from its own published table and writes it to your ledger — usually within a minute. That is why the bot's message says what was recorded and that it is applied on onflowads.com, never "your score is now N".
Both sides also see the verdict on the campaign's own results page, from their own point of view — see When a post came down early.
The number that moves is the one reliability score your account carries across all of Onflow Ads — the same score that gates account standing here, and that gates Paid Promotions and the Subscriber Exchange too. A cross-promotion cut short follows you into every other engine.
The monitor is not a separate court. Its findings land on the same ledger as everything else, and you contest one the same way you would any other entry — press Appeal on the row on your reliability page. See Appealing a penalty.
Paid Promotions runs the same kind of check with its own rules; if you also sell placements, Delivery monitoring and your reliability covers that side.
Account standing
Starting, joining or accepting a cross-promotion requires your account's reliability score to be at least 5.0 out of 10, and accounts under review are paused from forming new deals. The same check runs at every deal-formation point — create, join, propose, request send, request accept, Blitz claim, Blitz launch.
Three things are worth knowing about the floor:
- It is stricter than the rest of the platform. Paid Promotions and the Subscriber Exchange both sit at 4.0. Cross-promotion asks for 5.0 because no money sits in escrow — trust carries the whole deal.
- A brand-new account is allowed through. Only a concrete score below the floor blocks you; no score yet is not a fail. The refusal names both your score and the floor: "Cross-Promotion needs a reliability score of at least 5/10 — yours is 4.2/10."
- An operator can change it. The 5.0 figure is the shipped default and is settable from admin settings, so the exact number you are held to is always the one in the message.
Finishing campaigns you are already part of is never blocked.
A clean swap leaves your reliability score exactly where it was. Cross-promotion can only cost you points — −0.30 for ghosting a join, −1.00 for leaving the partner's channel early, −1.50 for removing the post early; it awards none.
The score is raised by completed Paid Promotions deals — +0.20 as the channel owner who delivered, +0.10 as the advertiser who booked — and by the clean-streak recovery that heals a below-baseline score on its own over time. If you are below the cross-promotion floor and cannot start swaps, those are the two routes back. See Reliability score.
Limits and plan gates
The monthly initiation allowance
Each plan includes a monthly number of cross-promotion initiations — creating a campaign, or sending a partnership request that gets accepted. Joining is never capped, on any plan.
| Plan | Initiations per month |
|---|---|
| Free | 5 |
| Referral Premium | 5 |
| Lite | 15 |
| Plus | 30 |
| Elite | 60 |
| Master | 120 |
| Ultimate | Unlimited |
- Your usage is shown in the plan strip on the create and campaign pages, as "X of Y this month" with a meter.
- Only campaigns that found and kept a partner spend a slot — expired, cancelled and ghost-released campaigns do not count.
- Auto-minted recurring rounds do count. They are never blocked by the cap, but each consumes a slot, so a weekly recurring swap uses roughly four a month.
- At the cap, creating or sending a request is refused with a message naming your plan, your usage and the plan that raises the limit. Joining stays open throughout, so a cap never stops you swapping — only from being the one who starts it.
What higher plans add
| Plan | Add-on discount | Completion reward | Insurance | Blitz |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | — | — | — | — |
| Referral Premium | — | — | — | — |
| Lite | 10% | $0.10 | — | — |
| Plus | 25% | $0.25 | — | — |
| Elite | 50% | $0.50 | Included | — |
| Master | 75% | $0.75 | Included | up to 5 partners |
| Ultimate | 100% | $1.00 | Included | up to 10 partners |
Upgrades live at https://onflowads.com/pricing.
The benefit marks your campaigns 🛡️ Insured without buying anything. The amount is never a fixed sum from the plan — it is the cover each party declares for that campaign, up to $500, and it is the party at fault who pays it. See Campaign insurance.
The percentage in the Add-on discount column applies to the two placement purchases — ★ Featured on a directory listing and ⚡ Boost on a partnership request — so a higher plan pays less for the same position, and Ultimate pays nothing. It does not apply to the $1 External Links add-on, which is flat on every plan. The prices, rung by rung, are on Add-ons and extras.
What higher plans change about the post itself
The table above is about money and capacity. A second set of gates changes what a cross-promotion actually produces:
| Plan | Inline buttons per post | Button colours | Ads your channel carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | — | — | Carry the attribution line |
| Referral Premium | — | — | Carry the attribution line |
| Lite | 1 | — | Carry the attribution line |
| Plus | 2 | ✓ | Run with no attribution line |
| Elite | 3 | ✓ | Run with no attribution line |
| Master | 4 | ✓ | Run with no attribution line |
| Ultimate | 4 | ✓ | Run with no attribution line |
Read the last column carefully, because it is the one members get backwards. It is the plan of the channel carrying the ad that decides, so your plan governs your partner's post running in your channel — never your own post running in theirs. There is no author-side control, on any plan. The rule, and what the line says, are on What gets posted; the buttons and the colour swatches are on Creatives.
The clean-completion reward
Per clean completion, the campaign's creator earns boost credit at their plan's rate — the "Earn $X / clean completion" pill in the plan strip. Three qualifications the pill does not make:
- It is promotional boost credit, not cash. It is spendable on Boost orders and is not withdrawable.
- Only the creator earns it. The plan strip shows the line to both sides, but the reward is paid to the account that initiated the campaign. Joining someone else's campaign earns nothing.
- The website pays it, from the campaign's own record. The bot marks a completed run clean — no confirmed violation on either side, no post that failed to publish or come down — and the website's reward sweep then grants the credit at the creator's plan rate. A Free or Referral Premium creator earns nothing, because that rate is $0.00.
It is capped at 30 paid completions per calendar month, and a campaign is settled exactly once.
The rules in one list
- Public channels only, with the Onflow Ads bot as admin — checked at every channel fetch.
- Show up: confirm or renegotiate promptly after joining. Unconfirmed joins are released at 48 hours and cost you a strike and −0.30 reliability.
- One decider per proposal: you never rule on your own schedule proposal, and only the receiving side approves a post.
- Review on time: post reviews auto-approve after 6 hours, and an auto-approval binds exactly like a manual one.
- Leave the post up — and stay in their channel — for the full run. Removing your partner's post early costs 1.50 reliability points, leaving their channel early costs 1.00, and both are watched for every 30 minutes.
- A half-run is never allowed. If both ads cannot be published, neither is, and nobody is penalised.
- One rating per side, after completion only, and final once submitted.
- Initiations are metered; joins are not.
- Money buys position, never trust. Featured placement and boosts do not touch verdicts, records or ratings.
- Results are free, permanent, and visible only to the participants.
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "Cross-Promotion needs a reliability score of at least 5/10 — yours is X." | Your score is below the floor. | Complete Paid Promotions deals, or let the clean-streak recovery heal it. Cross-promotion itself will not raise it. |
| "Your account is under review while an open fraud concern is resolved." | An open concern blocks new deals on every surface, whatever your score. | You can finish anything in flight. See Account standing. |
| "Joining is paused for now — a campaign you recently joined went unconfirmed." | Three ghost strikes triggered the 48-hour join cooldown. Each of those joins also cost −0.30 reliability. | The message names the reopening time. Creating your own campaigns still works. |
"You've used all N cross-promotion initiations your <plan> plan includes this month." | You hit the monthly cap. | Joining is still unlimited. Wait for the reset on the 1st, or upgrade. |
| A Violation pill on your results | The monitor confirmed you removed a cross-post early. | Read the banner, then appeal from your reliability page if it is wrong. |
| "Not enough wallet balance — top up to feature your listing." | A placement purchase would overdraw your wallet. Nothing was charged. | Top up, then try again. See Add-ons and extras. |
Related
- Reliability score — the one number every gate on this page reads.
- Campaign results — how the monitor's verdict is shown to each side.
- Add-ons and extras — the discount column, priced out rung by rung.
- Appealing a penalty — contesting an early-removal mark.
Next: Add-ons and extras — the paid extras around cross-promotion, and exactly where each one is bought.