1. Who These Guidelines Apply To
These Guidelines apply to everyone who uses OnFire, and to everything you create on it — messages, posts, stories, comments, profile information, photos and video, marketplace and rental listings, product descriptions, reviews, and anything you make with our AI features.
They apply the same way in private messages as in public posts. A rule against threatening someone is not suspended because the threat was sent in a one-to-one chat.
Some parts of OnFire have additional rules on top of these — rides, deliveries, car rental, and business selling each have their own terms. Where a service-specific rule is stricter, the stricter rule applies. Our Terms of Service set the minimum age for using OnFire.
What we can see. Messages sent through OnFire travel over encrypted connections and are stored encrypted on your device. They are not end-to-end encrypted: message content is held on OnFire's servers in a form our systems can read. That is why we are able to act on a report about a private message — and it is why you should not treat OnFire as a confidential channel. Our Privacy Policy sets out what we store and for how long.
How your feed is ordered. OnFire shows you posts in reverse chronological order — newest first. We do not rank your feed by predicted engagement, we do not build an interest profile of you to order it, and paying us never moves a post up it. What you see is what the people you follow posted, in the order they posted it.
We host and transmit what people post, and we remove it when we are put on notice that it breaches these Guidelines. We do not select or promote content on your behalf, and we do not vouch for it.
Sharing your location is off unless you turn it on. Nothing shares your location by default. When you do switch it on you can limit it to your contacts, and the features that show people nearby honour both that switch and that limit — they will not surface you to someone you have not chosen to share with.
Two further things we do not do, stated because their absence is invisible: we do not use face recognition, and we do not create a faceprint, voiceprint or any other biometric identifier from your photos, videos or voice messages. Where the app asks for Face ID or a fingerprint, that check happens on your own device, and the result — not your face or fingerprint — is all OnFire ever receives.
2. What Is Not Allowed
These are the categories we enforce against. They match the reporting options in the app, so that what you can report and what we prohibit are the same list.
Child sexual abuse and exploitation
Prohibited without exception, regardless of context or claimed intent. This includes sexual content involving anyone under 18, sexualised depictions of minors whether real, drawn, or AI-generated, grooming, sexual extortion, and trading or soliciting such material.
This is the one category with no warning and no second chance: the account is removed. See our Child Safety Policy for how to report a child at risk, and for what we can and cannot currently detect.
Harassment and bullying
Targeting a person with repeated unwanted contact, insults, humiliation, or intimidation. Encouraging others to pile on. Sexual harassment. Sharing someone's private information or intimate images without their consent. Creating accounts to evade a block.
Hate speech and hateful symbols
Attacking or dehumanising people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or immigration status. Slurs aimed at those characteristics. Symbols and imagery of hate groups used to promote them.
Violence, threats, and graphic content
Threatening to hurt someone. Inciting or coordinating violence. Praising or promoting terrorism or violent extremism. Gratuitously graphic imagery of death or injury shared for shock value. Content glorifying a violent attack or its perpetrator.
Nudity and sexual activity
Pornography and sexually explicit content. Non-consensual intimate imagery, including images created or altered to depict someone sexually without their consent. Offering or soliciting commercial sexual services.
Self-harm and suicide
Encouraging, instructing, or coordinating self-harm, suicide, or disordered eating. Content that presents these as aspirational.
Talking about your own mental health is not a violation, and we would rather you did. We do not remove people for saying they are struggling.
Illegal activity and regulated goods
Buying, selling, or arranging the supply of drugs, weapons, explosives, stolen goods, endangered wildlife, human trafficking, counterfeit currency or documents, or hacked data. Offering regulated goods — alcohol, tobacco, prescription medicines, gambling — outside the rules that apply to them.
Spam, scams, and deception
Bulk or repetitive unsolicited messaging. Phishing and attempts to obtain credentials or payment details by deception. Fake listings, fake reviews, and bait-and-switch pricing. Investment, romance, and advance-fee fraud. Artificially inflating engagement.
Impersonation and misrepresentation
Pretending to be another person, a business you are not authorised to represent, or OnFire staff. Parody and commentary are allowed where they are obvious and labelled.
Other people's privacy and rights
Publishing someone's personal information — home address, phone number, financial or identity documents — without their consent. Recording or sharing private communications where doing so is unlawful. Posting content you do not have the rights to, including copyrighted material and trademarks.
Misuse of our AI features
Using OnFire's AI assistant, image, or music generation to produce anything prohibited above — in particular sexual content involving minors, non-consensual intimate imagery, or a synthetic likeness of a real person used to deceive. Passing off AI-generated content as a real recording of a real event.
If you create or share a deep fake — synthetic or manipulated image, audio or video resembling a real person, place or event — you must disclose that it is artificially generated. Under the EU AI Act that duty falls on the person deploying the content, which is you, not on OnFire. See our AI Transparency page.
Ticket touting and fake reviews
Buying event tickets using bots or other automated means to get around a per-person purchase limit, and then reselling them, is prohibited — and is separately unlawful in the EU.
Writing, buying, selling or soliciting fake reviews, or reviewing something you have not used, is prohibited. See section 7.
Attacking the service itself
Automated scraping, credential stuffing, probing for vulnerabilities without authorisation, circumventing rate limits or access controls, or reverse-engineering the app to defeat its protections.
3. How We Find Violations
We would rather be precise about this than reassuring, because an inflated account of our detection would mislead you about how safe the service is.
Almost everything we act on, we act on because somebody reported it. Reports from people using OnFire are our primary source, and in practice our only reliable one.
Automated screening of public posts and comments is not currently in operation. Neither is the on-device safety assessment of message text. Where those systems run, they cover text and audio only.
In particular, we do not scan uploaded photos or video for prohibited content. There is no image or video classifier, and no matching of uploads against databases of known illegal material. Images and video are looked at only when someone reports them.
If you see something that breaks these Guidelines, reporting it is the thing most likely to get it removed. Please do not assume we have already seen it.
4. What Happens When a Rule Is Broken
What we do depends on which rule was broken, how serious it is, whether it looks deliberate, and what has happened on the account before. Severe breaches go straight to the strongest response.
| Action | What it means |
|---|---|
| Content removal | The specific post, message, listing, or photo is taken down. |
| Account freeze | The account is locked. You can sign in and see an explanation of why, but cannot post or message until it is resolved. This is the one enforcement action that comes with a reason and a route to challenge it. |
| Visibility reduction | Your content is shown to fewer people while your account continues to work normally. You are not notified when this happens. |
| Permanent removal | The account is closed and not restored. Reserved for the most serious breaches, and automatic for child sexual exploitation. |
Two things we want to be straightforward about, because you would otherwise reasonably assume the opposite.
Enforcement today is close to all-or-nothing. We do not currently issue warnings, restrict individual features while leaving the rest of an account working, or apply suspensions that lift automatically after a set period. Content comes down, or an account is frozen.
Outside an account freeze, we do not currently notify you when we act on your content, or tell you why. If a post, comment, listing or advert of yours is removed, or its visibility is reduced, you may not receive any notice. We recognise that this is a gap rather than a design choice, and we have listed visibility reduction above precisely because it is the sanction you would otherwise have no way of detecting.
Where content appears to involve an imminent risk to someone's life or safety, or a serious crime, we may contact law enforcement. See Law Enforcement Requests. Restrictions on business and seller accounts are covered separately in the Business User Terms.
5. How to Report Something
A working report option is available on feed posts, gallery photos, products shared in chat, food orders, and marketplace and rental listings and the people behind them. Choose a category, add a description if you want to, and submit. We keep a copy of the reported content at the moment you report it, so it can still be assessed if it is deleted afterwards.
Some surfaces cannot be reported in the app yet. Chat messages, stories, user profiles, comments, live streams and communities have no working report route. On chat messages a report control appears in the interface but does not currently submit anything — it is an unfinished feature.
To report anything on those surfaces, email [email protected] with as much detail as you can, including usernames and approximate times. For a child at risk, please read the Child Safety Policy first — it explains faster routes than reporting to us.
What happens next. Your report is recorded and placed in a queue. We do not currently send an acknowledgement, we cannot commit to a time within which a report will be looked at, and we do not tell you the outcome. We would rather say that plainly than publish a response time we are not currently meeting.
If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first — 999 in the UK and Ireland, 112 across the EU, 911 in the US. OnFire is not an emergency service and cannot dispatch help.
6. Disagreeing With a Decision
If your account is frozen, the app shows you the reason and lets you submit an appeal from that screen. That route works today, and it is the one place where you get both an explanation and a way to challenge it.
There is no appeal route for content removal. If an individual post, comment, listing or advert is taken down, or its visibility is reduced, there is currently no mechanism in the app to contest that specific decision. If you believe something was removed in error, email [email protected].
Business and seller accounts have their own restriction and complaint process, set out in the Business User Terms.
7. Reviews
Where OnFire shows reviews of a listing, product or service, you should know how much weight to give them.
We do not verify that a reviewer actually used the thing they reviewed. We take no steps to check that a review comes from a genuine transaction, and no review on OnFire is labelled as verified. Reviews are submitted by users and published as written.
Fake reviews are prohibited under section 2 and we remove them when they are reported to us, but you should read reviews on OnFire as unverified opinion rather than as confirmed accounts of a real purchase.
8. Changes to These Guidelines
We will update these Guidelines as the service changes and as we find places where they are unclear. Each version is dated and numbered at the top of this page. Where a change materially reduces what is permitted, we will give notice before it takes effect.