Hey everyone!
We wanted to introduce our new Honesty Policy and talk about why it was created.
In the past couple of months, we’ve observed some unethical activity on Tapas. As you know, we try to give our readers numerous ways to earn free Ink to support the community. Without going into too much detail, we’ve found a number of creators using a third-party tool to abuse the free Ink system and accumulate large amounts of Ink on an alternate account to support their main account.
This situation is pretty new for us, and in order to keep providing the best experience for the talented and hard-working community on Tapas, we’ve decided to create the Honesty Policy to discourage this from happening in the future.
Here is a quick look into what this policy means.
Exploitation
If we find evidence of fraudulent behavior by a creator or reader abusing the Ink system, we will investigate their activity, which could lead to a ban.
If we find a reader exploiting the system, any Ink they’ve used to support a creator that hasn’t yet been transferred will be frozen. We never want to take Ink from creators, but in order to keep our internal economy running we, unfortunately, can’t honor and payout on counterfeit Ink. If we do, it’s coming out of our own pockets and we don’t want our ink well to dry up.
Fake subscribers
Although extremely rare, we have seen instances of creators making hundreds of duplicate accounts to artificially increase their story’s metrics. In order to protect the integrity of the community and the hard work that other creators put in to get their stories into the Trending sections, we have decided to make this a bannable offense.
This policy does not affect the following:
- Creators who are unaware of their readers who make more than one account to follow them.
- Creators with supportive friends and families who only create an account to follow their story.
- Creators followed by spambots.
- Creators who follow their own story.
Adblockers
While we don’t require this, we want to encourage readers to turn their ad blockers off when visiting our site! The majority of this money goes straight to creators (we do take a small cut to keep our servers running), and it’s a great, free way for you to support the artists and writers you love.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let us know here!
Thank you for being a part of our community!
-The Tapas Team