Skip to content
Yap

Acceptable Use Policies

Effective date: September 27, 2026

Short version: Yap hosts people’s real takes: someone asks, someone answers in their own words, and the page keeps them. That only works when people ask and answer in good faith. While using the Service, you must comply with our Acceptable Use Policies, which include some restrictions on content and conduct on Yap related to user safety, intellectual property, privacy, authenticity, and other limitations. In short, be excellent to each other.

Capitalized terms used but not defined in these Acceptable Use Policies have the meanings assigned to them in your main agreement with us: the Yap Terms of Service.

1. Compliance with Laws and Regulations

You are responsible for using the Service in compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, and all of our Acceptable Use Policies. These policies may be updated from time to time and are provided below.

2. User Safety

We do not allow content or activity on Yap that:

  • is unlawful or promotes unlawful activities;

  • is sexually obscene or relates to sexual exploitation or abuse, including of minors;

  • is libelous, defamatory, or fraudulent;

  • is discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group;

  • is false, inaccurate, or intentionally deceptive information and likely to adversely affect the public interest (including health, safety, election integrity, and civic participation);

  • harasses or abuses another individual or group, including our employees, officers, and agents, or other users;

  • threatens or incites violence toward any individual or group, especially on the basis of who they are;

  • gratuitously depicts or glorifies violence, including violent images; or

  • is off-topic, or interacts with platform features in a way that significantly or repeatedly disrupts the experience of other users.

3. Intellectual Property, Authenticity, and Private Information

We do not allow content or activity on Yap that:

  • infringes any proprietary right of any party, including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or other right;

  • unlawfully shares unauthorized product licensing keys, software for generating unauthorized product licensing keys, or software for bypassing checks for product licensing keys, including extension of a free license beyond its trial period;

  • impersonates any person or entity, including any of our employees or representatives, including through false association with Yap, or by fraudulently misrepresenting your identity or site’s purpose; or

  • violates the privacy of any third party, such as by posting another person’s personal information without consent.

4. Spam and Inauthentic Activity on Yap

We do not allow content or activity on Yap that is:

  • automated excessive bulk activity and coordinated inauthentic activity, such as
    • spamming
    • cryptocurrency mining;
  • bulk distribution of promotions and advertising prohibited by Yap terms and policies;
  • inauthentic interactions, such as fake accounts and automated inauthentic activity;
  • referral or points abuse, and bulk or automated asks;
  • creation of or participation in secondary markets for the purpose of the proliferation of inauthentic activity;
  • using Yap as a platform for propagating abuse on other platforms;
  • phishing or attempted phishing; or
  • using our servers for any form of excessive automated bulk activity, to place undue burden on our servers through automated means, or to relay any form of unsolicited advertising or solicitation through our servers, such as get-rich-quick schemes.

5. Site Access and Safety

We do not allow content or activity on Yap that:

  • directly supports unlawful active attack or malware campaigns that are causing technical harms (such as using our platform to deliver malicious executables or as attack infrastructure, for example by organizing denial of service attacks or managing command and control servers) with no implicit or explicit dual-use purpose prior to the abuse occurring; or
  • uses our servers to disrupt or to attempt to disrupt, or to gain or to attempt to gain unauthorized access to, any service, device, data, account or network.

6. Services Usage Limits

You will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service without our express written permission.

7. Information Usage Restrictions

You may use information from our Service for the following reasons, regardless of whether the information was scraped or obtained otherwise:

  • Researchers may use public, non-personal information from the Service for research purposes, only if any publications resulting from that research are open access.
  • Archivists may use public information from the Service for archival purposes.

Scraping refers to extracting information from our Service via an automated process, such as a bot or webcrawler.

You may not use information from the Service (whether scraped or obtained otherwise) for spamming purposes, including for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails to users or selling personal information, such as to recruiters, headhunters, and job boards.

Your use of information from the Service must comply with the Yap Privacy Policy.

8. Privacy

Misuse of personal information is prohibited.

Any person, entity, or service collecting data from the Service must comply with the Yap Privacy Policy, particularly in regards to the collection of personal information. If you collect any personal information from the Service, you agree that you will only use that personal information for the purpose for which that User has authorized it. You agree that you will reasonably secure any personal information you have gathered from the Service, and you will respond promptly to complaints, removal requests, and “do not contact” requests from us or other users.

9. Excessive Bandwidth Use

The Service’s bandwidth limitations vary based on the features you use. If we determine your bandwidth usage to be significantly excessive in relation to other users of similar features, we reserve the right to suspend your Account, throttle your file hosting, or otherwise limit your activity until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption. We also reserve the right, after providing advance notice, to remove media that we determine to be placing undue strain on our infrastructure.

10. Advertising on Yap

Short version: A yap is somebody’s take, not ad space.

A yap is not ad space. You may not send bulk promotional asks, and you may not present sponsored content as a personal take without disclosing the sponsorship.

You may not promote or distribute content or activity that is illegal or otherwise prohibited by our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policies, including excessive automated bulk activity (for example, spamming), get-rich-quick schemes, and misrepresentation or deception related to your promotion.

If you post any promotional material, you are solely responsible for complying with all applicable laws and regulations, including without limitation the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Guidelines on Endorsements and Testimonials. We reserve the right to remove any promotional materials or advertisements that, in our sole discretion, violate any Yap terms or policies.

11. User Protection

You must not engage in activity that significantly harms other users.

We will interpret our policies and resolve disputes in favor of protecting users as a whole.

Enforcement. Yap retains full discretion to take action in response to a violation of these policies, including account suspension, account termination, or removal of content.

Reinstatement and appeal. If your content or account has been disabled or restricted and you seek reinstatement or wish to appeal, email hi@yap.so.