Your Reliability as a Buyer
Reliability is one number out of 10, held on your account, shared by every product on Onflow Ads. In Paid Promotions it does two jobs. It decides whether you may start a new deal — both booking a placement and placing an auction bid are gated on it — and a penalty on it restarts the count of clean placements behind the veteran rate: the standard rate is 9%, the veteran rate is 7% once you have completed 100 clean placements after your most recent penalty, and a penalty overturned on appeal restores the count by itself. See Escrow and buyer protection.
Most advertisers never think about it, because everyone starts comfortably above the floor and a clean campaign only raises it. This page exists so that if it does move, you know exactly why.
The numbers
| Fact | The figure |
|---|---|
| Where every account starts | 8.00 |
| The range | 0.0 to 10.0 |
| The floor to book or bid in Paid Promotions | 4.0 |
| Where you can read your own score | The Reliability tile on your advertiser home, and your reliability page |
The floor is the same for buyers and for channel owners, and it is settable by an operator — the block message always quotes the live figure rather than a number this page could go stale on.
Anything already in flight finishes normally: your live placements still run, still get monitored, still release or refund. What the floor blocks is starting something new — a checkout, or a bid.
Every event that moves a buyer's score
These are the buyer-side events. There are others on the platform (the channel-owner side, Cross-Promotion, Subscriber Exchange, Boost) that move the same number, but these are the ones an advertiser can trigger.
| Event | Change | When it fires |
|---|---|---|
| A clean, completed campaign | +0.10 | A placement you booked ran and completed cleanly |
| A rejected fraud concern | −0.50 | A dispute you raised was reviewed and found not to stand |
| A pattern of rejected concerns | −0.50 | Weaponising the dispute flow, on top of the individual penalties |
| Confirmed referral or signup abuse | −2.00 | Self-referral or fake-signup fraud |
| AI-made content used in an upheld scam or spam campaign | −1.00 | An upheld finding, not a suspicion |
| Confirmed AI abuse | −2.00 | Prompt-injection, jailbreak or banned-content attempts |
There is no "abandoned booking" penalty. A booking you withdraw before the owner accepts is refunded in full; a booking you cancel after the owner accepted but before the ad goes live is refunded in full too — the owner's good-faith deposit goes back to them, and nobody's reliability changes. Once the post is live it can no longer be cancelled by anyone. See Cancelling a booking.
The dispute form says so before you type: "If our review finds this concern doesn't stand, it costs you −0.5 reliability (a pattern of rejected concerns costs more). A genuine concern is always safe — this only affects false or unfounded ones." Check the live post and the proof archive before you submit — they are the same evidence the review uses.
What never moves it
- An upheld dispute costs you nothing. Being right is free.
- A booking the owner declined, or ignored, or failed to deliver costs you nothing. That is the owner's side of the ledger, not yours.
- Cancelling before go-live costs you nothing — at any stage before the post is published, and whichever side cancels. Full refund, no fee, no score change.
- A booking declined because the owner could not accept costs nobody anything. When a channel owner is under review or below the marketplace floor, a request for their channel is declined for them at once and refunded to you in full — with no penalty on either side.
- Buying your own listing through a linked account credits nothing at all. The completion bonus is withheld when the buyer and the seller are the same actor — the same account, or two accounts sharing one Telegram identity. Buying from yourself is not a trust signal, so it does not read as one — and a wash trade never counts towards the veteran milestone either.
Recovering
Two things raise the score, and they work together:
- Complete clean campaigns. Each one is worth +0.10.
- Time. A clean streak recovers the score on its own — the block message says so: "Complete clean deals to raise it — and a clean streak also recovers it over time on its own."
There is no way to buy the score back, and no plan sets a different floor.
The separate participation block
Falling below the floor is not the only thing that stops a new deal. While an open fraud concern against you is being resolved, or your wallet is frozen for a review, your account is blocked from starting anything regardless of the number:
Your account is under review while an open fraud concern is resolved. You can finish anything already in progress, but can't start a new deal until it's cleared — see your reliability page.
This is checked before the score, because telling somebody under review that their score is too low would be the wrong message.
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "Paid Promotions needs a reliability score of at least 4/10 — yours is X/10…" | You are under the floor at checkout or at a bid | Complete clean campaigns; a clean streak also recovers the score on its own. Anything already booked still runs |
| "Your reliability is X/10 — Paid Promotions needs at least 4/10 to book." | The cart's own pre-check, shown before you press pay | Same answer. The cart shows it early so you are not refused after a charge attempt |
| "Your account is under review while an open fraud concern is resolved." | A dispute against you is open, or your wallet is frozen for a review | Nothing you can do until it is decided. Existing placements are unaffected |
| Your score dropped and you do not know why | Every change is recorded as an event on your account | Open your reliability page — it lists the events; if one looks wrong, contact support |
Related
- Reliability score — the platform-wide policy this page is the Paid Promotions view of.
- Orders and campaigns — the cancellation rules: a full refund at every stage before go-live, and no reliability change.
- Raising a dispute — what a rejected concern costs, and how to avoid raising one.
- Escrow and buyer protection — what happens automatically, so you rarely need to dispute at all.