Terms of Service

The agreement

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a contract between you and Dustn.co, of 3424 Stine Rd. #217, Bakersfield, CA 93309 (“we”, “us”). We operate The Board at toptheboard.com. These Terms govern your use of that site, everything on it, and every purchase you make through it (together, the “Service”).

By creating an account, buying a listing, or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

If you are agreeing on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. It is part of this agreement.

What The Board is

The Board is a single public page of paid advertising slots. Every slot shows a brand name, a logo, a short line of copy, a category and an outbound link.

Position is decided by money and by nothing else. Listings are sorted by the total amount paid against them, highest first, with ties broken by whoever got there first. The top position (the “throne”) can only be taken by paying more than the current holder, by at least 5% or one dollar, whichever is larger.

Rank is therefore not an award, a review, a ranking of quality, an endorsement, a recommendation, or any statement by us about a brand, a product or a business. Nothing on The Board is editorial. We do not vouch for anything advertised on it.

The Service is an advertising placement product. It is not a marketplace, an auction with a settlement obligation, a security, an investment, a game of chance, a prize competition, or a financial product of any kind.

Who may use it

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or to buy anything on the Service. The Service is not directed at children and we do not knowingly allow anyone under 18 to use it.

You must have the legal capacity to enter into a contract, and you must not be barred from using the Service under the laws that apply to you, including sanctions and export control rules.

You may not use the Service if we have previously terminated your account, unless we agree in writing that you may.

Your account

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including any purchase made from it. Keep your credentials to yourself and tell us promptly at hello@toptheboard.com if you believe your account has been used without your permission.

The information you give us has to be accurate, and you have to keep it accurate. A billing address, a contact email and a brand identity that are all real are the minimum for an advertising account.

One person or organisation, one account. Opening additional accounts to multiply rewards, evade a suspension, evade a rate limit, or make a single advertiser look like several is a breach of these Terms.

Purchases and payment

Everything on The Board is a one-off purchase. There is no subscription, no recurring charge and no stored personal balance. You are shown the exact amount before you confirm, and that is the amount charged.

Purchasable actions currently include: taking a listing, raising the amount paid against a listing, buying a sabotage effect against another listing, buying protection for a listing (yours or anyone else's), and backing another listing.

Where a statutory right to cancel or refund applies to you and cannot be waived by contract, that right stands and nothing above limits it. Consumers in some jurisdictions have such rights; by asking us to make a listing live immediately you may be agreeing that performance begins at once.

Prices are exclusive of tax unless we say otherwise. You are responsible for any tax, duty or levy on your purchase other than tax on our income.

Payments are handled by a third-party payment processor. We do not see or store your full card number. Their terms apply to the payment itself alongside these Terms.

Raising a chargeback rather than contacting us first is grounds for immediate suspension of your account and removal of your listings, without refund.

What a purchase does not buy

A purchase buys the mechanical effect described at the point of sale. It does not buy an outcome.

• No guaranteed duration. Anyone can outbid you at any moment. A position is yours only while it is the most expensive one, which may be seconds.
• No guaranteed traffic. Impression and click figures shown on the Service are our own measurements of activity on our own page. They are estimates of what a position delivered, not a promise of what it will deliver.
• No guaranteed revenue, leads, conversions or return. What happens after somebody clicks through to your site is your business.
• No exclusivity. Competitors may list beside you, above you, or in your category.
• No protection from sabotage unless you have bought protection, and protection expires.

Figures on the Service may be revised if we find a counting error, fraud, or bot traffic. Revising a figure is not a refundable event.

What you may advertise

You are responsible for everything in your listing: the brand name, the logo, the copy, the category and the destination the link points to, both when it goes live and every day after.

You confirm that you own or are licensed to use everything you upload, that your claims are truthful and substantiated, and that the advertisement and the product behind it comply with every law and advertising code that applies to you, including disclosure rules for regulated goods and services.

Your destination link must point to the business the listing describes. Cloaking, redirect chains that end somewhere else, and swapping the destination after a listing has been reviewed are all prohibited.

What may not be advertised

Also prohibited, without limitation:

• Anything involving minors sexually. This is reported to the relevant authorities, the account is terminated, and there is no appeal.
• Illegal goods and services anywhere the Service is available, including controlled substances, prescription medicines sold without prescription, counterfeit goods, stolen data or credentials, and weapons, ammunition and their components.
• Fraud and deception: phishing, fake stores, get-rich-quick schemes, pyramid and matrix schemes, unregistered securities, deceptive financial products, fake reviews, and anything designed to separate people from money under false pretences.
• Malware, spyware and stalkerware, credential harvesting, and software whose purpose is to compromise a device or an account.
• Hate, harassment and violence: content attacking people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation; threats; targeted harassment of a private individual; graphic violence and gore; and content promoting terrorism or violent extremism.
• Self-harm and eating disorder promotion.
• Gambling, lotteries, betting and prediction markets other than where properly licensed for the audience reached, with our prior written agreement.
• Tobacco, vaping and nicotine products, and alcohol advertised without the disclosures its market requires.
• Impersonation: using a brand, logo, name or identity that is not yours, or implying an affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement that does not exist, including with us.
• Infringement of copyright, trade mark, patent, trade secret, privacy or publicity rights.
• Personal information about other people placed in a listing, in a tag, or in any public field.
• Political advertising, election material and issue advocacy, which we do not accept in any market.

If you are not sure whether something is allowed, ask at legal@toptheboard.com before you pay. We would rather answer the question than remove the listing.

Review, removal and enforcement

We may review a listing before it goes live and at any time afterwards, including every time it is edited, and we may check where its link actually goes. We are not obliged to review anything, and no review by us is an approval, a warranty, or a defence for you.

Where a listing, a logo, a tag or a destination breaks these Terms we may, at our discretion and without notice: hide or remove it, disable its link, refuse to make it live, freeze the account behind it, suspend or terminate the account, and report the matter to the authorities.

Removal for a breach of these Terms does not entitle you to a refund of anything. That includes the amount paid for the listing, anything paid to raise it, and any protection bought for it.

We may also remove or suspend a listing where we are required to by law, where a credible third-party complaint is made, where a payment is reversed, or where keeping it live would expose us or other users to legal risk.

To report a listing, write to abuse@toptheboard.com with the brand name and what is wrong with it.

Sabotage, protection and backing

The Service includes paid actions that affect other people's listings. By using the Service you accept that these actions may be used against yours, and that this is a designed part of the product rather than a defect.

Sabotage

• Sabotage affects how a listing looks and whether its link works. It never changes what a listing paid and never changes its true rank. A demotion effect changes displayed position only.
• Every effect is timed and expires on its own. Waiting for an effect to expire is always free. Nothing on the Service can force you to spend.
• A listing can carry at most 3 effects at once, and a protected listing cannot be hit at all.
• Sabotage is not publicly attributed. We do not show who bought an attack, on the target's listing, in the activity rail, or anywhere else. We do record it internally for rate limiting, abuse handling, and to answer a lawful request.
• Anonymity to other users is not anonymity from us. Using sabotage to harass a specific person or business, rather than to compete for a position, is a breach of these Terms.
• A sabotage tag is content and is subject to every content rule in section 08.

Protection

• Protection blocks sabotage for its duration and is capped at 24 hours. Nobody is invulnerable indefinitely.
• Anyone may buy protection for anyone. Buying it for another listing gives you no rights over that listing.

Backing

• Backing puts money into another listing's war chest. It is a gift. It is not a loan, an investment, a purchase of equity, a share of revenue, or a claim of any kind on that brand or on us.
• The listing's owner decides how the war chest is spent. You have no say and no recourse if they spend it in a way you would not have.
• Backing is public: your handle and the amount appear on that listing. Do not back a listing if you do not want that to be visible.
• Backing cannot be withdrawn, transferred or refunded.

War chests and earned credit

A war chest is credit held against a single listing. It comes from two places: people who back that listing, and credit the listing earns through the reward actions in the account panel.

• Credit is not money. It has no cash value, cannot be withdrawn, cannot be transferred between listings or accounts, and is not redeemable for anything outside the Service.
• Credit comes off the price when that listing raises its bid, buys protection for itself, or scrubs damage. Whatever the credit does not cover is charged.
• Credit can never pay for an attack. Sabotage is always a direct payment. This is a structural rule, not a setting.
• There is no way to add credit to your own war chest directly. There is nothing to top up and nothing to pre-fund.
• Earned credit is subject to daily caps and to verification. We may withhold, reverse or cancel credit we believe was obtained through fraud, automation, self-dealing, duplicate accounts, or a bug.
• Unused credit is forfeited when a listing is removed or an account is closed.

Acceptable use of the Service itself

Separately from what you advertise, you agree not to:

• Use bots, scripts, headless browsers or any automation to interact with the Service, place purchases, or generate impressions or clicks.
• Inflate, deflate or otherwise manipulate any metric, including clicking your own listing or arranging for others to.
• Scrape the Service, or systematically collect data from it, other than through an interface we publish for that purpose.
• Probe, load-test, interfere with or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the Service or its infrastructure.
• Reverse engineer or attempt to derive source code from the Service, except where that restriction is unenforceable where you live.
• Circumvent rate limits, caps, protection, or any enforcement action.
• Resell, sublicense or broker access to the Service or to a position on it.
• Use the Service to harass, defame, dox or threaten anyone.

Security research is welcome. Report anything you find to legal@toptheboard.com and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before you tell anyone else. Do not access other people's data, and do not degrade the Service for others.

Impressions, clicks and measurement

The Service publishes an impression count and a click count on every listing, and board-wide totals in the footer.

These are our own measurements, taken with commercially reasonable methods, and they are the figures that govern between us. They will not match your own analytics exactly. Ad blockers, privacy settings, redirects, bot filtering and different counting rules all produce discrepancies, and a discrepancy is not by itself evidence of an error.

Nothing on the Service pays out on a click. A click is a metric we report to you, never a currency: no credit, no rank and no reward is attached to one.

We may exclude traffic we believe to be automated, fraudulent or duplicated, and we may restate figures where we find a counting error.

Intellectual property

The Service, its design, its code and everything in it other than user content belongs to us or our licensors. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of it to you.

Your content stays yours. By submitting it you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display, resize and distribute it, for as long as it is on the Service and for a reasonable period afterwards in archives and backups, in order to operate and promote the Service. That includes showing your listing in screenshots, in a rank badge, and in ordinary marketing of The Board.

You may use a rank badge we provide, on your own site, while the rank it shows is accurate. You may not otherwise use our name, logo or brand without written permission.

If you believe something on the Service infringes your rights, write to legal@toptheboard.com with enough detail to identify the work, the listing, and your authority to act. We remove infringing material and terminate repeat infringers.

Any feedback or suggestion you send us may be used freely and without obligation.

Third-party sites and services

Every listing links somewhere we do not control. We do not review, endorse or take responsibility for any linked site, its content, its products, its privacy practices or its security. Following a link is at your own risk and is governed by that site's own terms.

The Service also depends on third parties for hosting, payments, analytics and email. Their availability affects ours.

Changes to the Service and to these Terms

The Service is under active development. We may add, change, price, reprice or remove any feature, including the pricing formulas, the reward amounts, the sabotage catalogue and the size of the increment required to take the throne. We may also introduce seasons or epochs that reset positions.

We may suspend or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, at any time. Discontinuation does not entitle you to a refund of a completed purchase.

We may change these Terms. Where a change is material we will give reasonable notice, by email or on the Service, before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept it, stop using the Service.

Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time by writing to hello@toptheboard.com. Closing an account does not refund anything and forfeits any credit.

We may suspend or terminate your account and remove your listings, with or without notice, where you breach these Terms, where we are required to by law, where your payment is reversed, or where continuing to serve you would expose us or others to legal or reputational risk.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination do survive it, including purchases and payment, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity and governing law.

Disclaimers

The Service is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or trade usage.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error free, that any defect will be corrected, that any measurement will be exact, or that any advertising result will be achieved.

We make no representation about any brand, product, service or claim advertised on the Service. Position on The Board is bought, not earned, and must not be read as anything else.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, the exclusions above apply only so far as the law allows.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither we nor our officers, employees, contractors or suppliers are liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost goodwill, lost data, or the cost of substitute services, arising out of or connected with the Service, however caused and on any theory of liability.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or connected with the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred dollars.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, and in those places the limitations above apply only so far as the law allows.

Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, demand, loss, liability, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your content, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, your breach of any law or advertising code, or your infringement of anyone's rights.

We will tell you about any such claim, and you may control its defence provided you do not settle it in a way that admits fault on our part or imposes an obligation on us without our written agreement.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Before filing anything, write to legal@toptheboard.com describing the dispute. Most things are resolved faster this way. If we cannot resolve it within sixty days, either of us may bring proceedings in the state and federal courts located in Kern County, California, and we each consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.

Any claim must be brought within one year of the event giving rise to it, so far as the law allows.

If you are a consumer, nothing here deprives you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country where you live, or of your right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

General

Entire agreement

These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said or written before.

Severability

If any provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.

No waiver

Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.

Assignment

You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.

No agency

Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship between us.

Force majeure

Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something outside our reasonable control.

Notices

We may give notice by email to the address on your account or by posting on the Service. You give notice to us at legal@toptheboard.com.

Contact

Dustn.co
3424 Stine Rd. #217
Bakersfield, CA 93309
United States

General

hello@toptheboard.com

Legal and intellectual property

legal@toptheboard.com

Reporting a listing

abuse@toptheboard.com

Privacy

privacy@toptheboard.com