Paid rooms: our rules

A private room can be sold. That means money moves between two people who have never met, on our say-so, and the person handing it over cannot see what they are buying. This document is what we do about that: the limits on what a creator may charge, how those limits move, what happens when somebody reports a room, and what we will not do.

It applies to every paid room on Showfinch. It sits alongside the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy, which continue to apply in full.

1. What a room may charge

No room may charge more than ₹500 a month, ever. That is not a judgement about what a room could be worth. It is the size of the loss one person can suffer before we have had a chance to notice anything, and while this is new we would rather that number stayed small.

Below that ceiling, what a room may charge is earned rather than granted. Every room starts at the lowest limit, whoever opens it.

Every condition has to hold at once. A single score can be pushed up by whichever part is easiest to fake, and the easiest part is the one a fraud will use. There is deliberately no cheap route through this: the cheapest route is running a real room for a couple of months.

Why these particular things

• Time and activity together. An account that signed up six months ago and has touched nothing since is dormant, not established. Age on its own promotes the patient.
• An audience that arrived on its own. Followers are the cheapest honest signal there is, and awkward to manufacture at the scale a small fraud operates at.
• People who stayed a second month. The one that matters most. Nobody renews a room that took their money and gave them nothing. It cannot be written by a friend, and it cannot be brigaded by a stranger. One good month is what a scam looks like too; a second month is what one never survives.

Standing can go down

It is worked out fresh every time it is asked for, not stored. Emptying a room, going quiet, or an upheld report lowers the limit immediately. If a room is priced above what it may currently charge, nobody new can join until the price comes down — and everybody already inside keeps exactly what they paid for. We do not take access away from somebody because their creator’s standing changed.

2. Reviews

Only people who have actually been inside a room can review it. A review from somebody who never got in measures nothing, and an open review box on a page anyone can reach is a brigading tool with extra steps. Somebody whose month has run out can still review — that is often the most useful opinion there is.

Reviews are anonymous, and structurally so. No screen we build for a creator reads who wrote one, and there is no query behind those screens that could answer it. The question is not five stars; it is whether the room was worth what you paid. Five stars collects a mood and reports it as a measurement.

A room’s score is not shown at all until at least five people have answered. Below that, one person is a fifth of the number, and a figure on screen gets acted on whatever caveat is printed underneath it. The count is withheld with it, because “2 reviews” tells you what one person said the moment a third appears.

A review can carry a note in the member’s own words. Notes are never published. They are not shown on the room’s page, they are not shown to other members, and the creator is never shown them. We read them when somebody reports the room, and for nothing else.

Publishing them anonymously would put us in the position of hosting accusations we have not checked, next to a creator who could not answer without first working out who wrote them — and on a room this small, working that out is usually easy. So the words stay with us and the count is what goes on the page.

We delete note text after seven days. It is evidence for a report filed around the same time; after that it is one person’s opinion of another sitting in a database for no further purpose, and keeping less is the right default. The Yes or No is kept, because that is what the score and the price limit are built from.

Reviews can only ever lower what a room may charge, never raise it. If most of the people who paid say it was not worth it, the limit drops a step. Praise is the easiest thing in this product to manufacture, so we do not let it buy anything.

3. Reporting a room

Anyone with an account can report a room. You do not have to have paid for it, and you do not have to have been inside.

The creator is never told who reported them — not the name, not the email, not the fact that a particular person reported at all. A report a creator can trace back is a report nobody safely files, and the people best placed to notice a fraud are exactly the ones on the member list.

What we act on:

• Paid and got nothing, or nothing like what was promised
• The room is not what its page says it is
• Somebody else’s work, published without permission
• Sexual content, which is not allowed on Showfinch at all
• Anything illegal
• Harassment, or content about a person who did not agree to be there — including intimate images shared without consent, which we remove within 24 hours of being told, as the Information Technology Rules 2021 require

What happens next

1. A person reads it. Reports are not decided by a counter.
2. If we uphold it, the room drops to the lowest limit and stops taking new members. Serious cases end the account.
3. If we do not, nothing happens to the room, and nothing happens to you for having asked.

A report on its own changes nothing. An accusation is not a finding. A product where one anonymous report costs somebody their livelihood has built a weapon, not a safeguard — so only a decision a person actually made moves anything.

4. What we do not do

Being plain about the limits of this matters as much as the rules themselves.

• We do not check rooms before they open. Nobody at Showfinch looks inside a private room as a matter of course, and we would not want a product where somebody did.
• We are not a guarantee. These limits reduce how much can be lost and how fast; they do not make it impossible to be disappointed by something you bought.
• We do not invent numbers. Where we have too little information to say something honestly — a review score from three people, for instance — we show nothing rather than something shaped like an answer.
• We do not sell standing. No plan, at any price, raises what a room may charge. It is earned by delivering, and by nothing else.

5. Consent

Opening a paid room means agreeing to this document. Concretely, you agree that: your standing is worked out from the signals listed in section 1; people who have been in your room may review it anonymously and you will not be told who did; anyone may report your room; and we may lower your limit or close your room on the strength of a report we uphold.

Joining a paid room means agreeing that we record the purchase, that your membership runs for the period you bought and then ends unless you buy again, and that we may show your handle to that room’s creator, as the Privacy Policy already describes for anyone who opens a room.

6. Money

Payments are taken by Razorpay. We never see or hold your card details. What a creator earns from a room is money we collect and owe on to them; our own subscription fees are separate and are ours.

If a room takes your money and gives you nothing, report it. Where we uphold that, the room stops taking new members and the account may be closed.

We cannot reverse a payment ourselves yet. Refunding through us is being built and this page will say so when it exists; until then, upholding a report stops the room rather than returning your money, and a payment made by card can be disputed with the bank that issued it. We would rather say that plainly than let this page imply a remedy we do not have.

7. Reaching us

Reports go through the button on any room, which is faster and keeps them in one queue. Anything else about this document, including a decision you think we got wrong, can go to [GRIEVANCE OFFICER NAME] at [GRIEVANCE OFFICER EMAIL]. We answer grievances within 15 days, as the Information Technology Rules 2021 require.