Acceptable Use Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-25

This policy is part of our Terms of Service and applies to everybody using HappyLike.

It is not the community guidelines, and it does not repeat them. The Community Guidelines are what this place is: how people treat each other, what gets removed, and the four steps of what happens when somebody breaks a rule. They are the document to read if you want to know whether a post is welcome here.

This one covers the other half — what you may not do to the service itself. Almost nobody needs to read it. It exists so that the answer to somebody scraping the site, or running twenty accounts, or probing for holes, is written down in advance rather than improvised.

1. Your account

One person, one account. You may not share it, sell it, rent it, or let somebody else use it.

You may not create an account to get around a suspension or a removal — yours or anybody else's. Evading enforcement is itself a reason for permanent removal, and it applies to the accounts you make afterwards.

You may not impersonate a person or an organisation, or pick a handle or display name designed to be mistaken for somebody else.

Automated accounts are not allowed. Everything here assumes a person.

2. Reaching the service

You may use the service through our own apps and website, and through our API with a key we issued you.

You may not:

Scrape it, or collect information about people here in bulk by any means, whether or not the information is public. A profile being readable is not permission to build a database of profiles.
Automate access, including with scripts, bots, headless browsers or scheduled requests, beyond what a person using the product would generate.
Work around a limit. That includes rate limits, the cap on how many people a post may tag, the size of a community, upload limits, and anything else the service enforces. Rotating addresses or accounts to get more of something is working around a limit.
Reuse or share an API key we issued for one application, or use one on behalf of a service we have not agreed to.

We may rate-limit, throttle or refuse traffic that is disproportionate, whatever it is for.

3. Security

You may not probe, scan or test the security of the service, or try to reach any account, system or data that is not yours. You may not interfere with the service or the people using it — no flooding, no denial of service, no malware, no attempting to intercept anybody's traffic or credentials.

If you find a vulnerability, tell us. Use the contact form, give us a reasonable chance to fix it, and do not access, change or keep anybody else's data while you are proving it. We will not pursue somebody who reports a problem that way. We are not running a paid bounty.

4. Selling things here

Businesses advertise by advertising. If you want to reach people here, buy an ad: those are reviewed by a person before anyone sees them, and they are marked as what they are. Ordinary posts used to sell, recruit, or drive traffic take something the people who paid did not get, and we will remove them.

That is not a rule against mentioning where you work, being proud of your own small business, or thanking a shop that was kind to you. The test is who the post is for — the reader, or the business.

You may not run competitions, giveaways, multi-level marketing, affiliate schemes or paid promotion through ordinary posts, and you may not sell, lend or transfer your account's reach to anybody.

5. Other people's content

You may not copy content from here and republish it as a feed, a dataset, an archive or a training corpus. Somebody posting about their worst week did not publish it to be scraped.

You may not use anything here to train a machine learning model without our written permission.

You may not remove, obscure or alter any attribution, and you may not present somebody else's post as your own.

6. What happens if you break this

The published Community Guidelines set out the four steps we take with content and accounts, and we follow them here too: content removed, a warning, a temporary suspension, permanent removal. Serious cases skip straight to the end.

Technical abuse — scraping, evasion, security probing, interfering with the service — is treated as serious from the start. We may block addresses, revoke keys, and remove accounts without a warning, and we may do it before any of it has been explained to you.

If we remove something or suspend you, you will be told, with a reason, and you can contest it at /appeals — except where telling you would help somebody keep doing it.

7. Reporting somebody

Use the report control on the post, reply or profile. If you cannot sign in, use the contact form.

Reporting people in bulk because you disagree with them is itself a misuse of the service, and it can cost you your own ability to report — the guidelines say so and the service enforces it. Reports about somebody's safety are never counted against you, even when they turn out to be wrong.

8. Changes

We will give at least 14 days' notice of a material change to this policy, the same notice the Terms promise.