How the island stays safe, in plain English.

There are five things you can tell us, and each one does something different. We would rather say plainly what each does than promise everyone the same satisfying sentence.

Not their photo / impersonation

Instant removal, always. Whether it is sent by the person in the photo — "this is me" — or by somebody who recognizes them, a live listing comes off the board immediately, before anyone has looked, and a human investigates afterwards. There is no undo button: the stored photo is deleted in the same operation, so nothing is put back on the board. If we turn out to have been wrong, the person can enter again — a fresh listing, from $0, on the same terms as anybody else (money rule 3). If we are slow instead, someone's face is on a board they never agreed to. We would rather be wrong for an hour.

Under 18

Straight to the priority queue, looked at in hours. If it is confirmed, our policy is fixed in advance and nobody gets to weigh it: the listing is removed, the photo and any avatar made from it are deleted, and the stake is refunded in full.

Explicit or hateful content

Priority queue, decided by a person. The listing stays up until somebody has actually looked at it — we are not going to tell you it is gone while it is still there.

Link doesn't work

Priority check by a person. This is how a handle that was renamed away comes to our attention. A confirmed dead link is a removal for cause: the listing comes off and the stake stays in the pot. If that handle ever comes back, it comes back at $0.

Something else

The queue, read by a person. Use it for anything the four above do not cover — we would much rather read a vague report than miss a real problem.

Two rules cover all five. Report volume never removes anything — a hundred reports and one report get a listing exactly the same thing, which is a person looking at it. Otherwise mass reporting would be a free way to sabotage a slot somebody paid for. And the impersonation report is the one automated action on this site — every other listing stays on the board until a human decides. That is the honest version, and it is the one we print.

Every photo is screened automatically before a listing can go live — for nudity and explicit content, for apparent age, for whether this is one real human face, for celebrity and stock-image tells, and for text, contact details, or QR codes pasted into the image.

The screen has three outcomes, never two. Pass sends you to a checkout, and you are live at rank the moment it clears. Reject asks for a different photo and never shows you a payment page at all. Escalate waits for a human, who either says no — again, no payment page ever — or says yes and emails you a link to pay. The uncertain band never decides by itself, and the model's opinion is advice to a person, never a verdict. Any photo where the age is even arguable goes to a human, every time — before the board, not after.

This is the whole of why a submission that never goes live is never charged: not a hold we remember to release, but an order of operations. We do not take a card at all until a photo has cleared, so there is no moment at which a rejected entry could be charged by accident. A cleared entry is held for 24 hours; if it is not paid for in that time it expires, the photo is deleted, and the five digits go back in the pot for somebody else.

Separately, every upload is checked against a dedicated child-sexual-abuse-material detection service — a purpose-built one, never the general image model. A match carries a mandatory reporting duty to NCMEC under federal law, which we follow. Nothing about that path resolves itself automatically.

Photos are rebuilt before they are stored: metadata stripped — including the GPS coordinates phones quietly bury in a picture — center-cropped square, re-encoded, stored at 512 pixels or smaller, and displayed at about 256. The file you uploaded is never stored and never served.

On a rejection the photo is never stored at all: the whole check happens in one request, in memory, and the bytes are gone when it ends. The photo does travel to the services that screen it — that is what screening is — but it never reaches our store, and no rejected face is on a disk of ours. What does survive is deliberately small and boring: the entry itself, marked rejected, so those five digits can never be handed to somebody else; the stake it asked for, recorded and unpaid, with no payment page attached to it and no way for one to be; and one line in our server log saying what the screen decided. We would rather tell you exactly which three small things exist than claim a clean slate we do not have.

No listing ever appears at $0: going live and the first credited dollar happen in the same operation, so there is no window in which somebody is on the board for free.

You must be 18 or older to use The Island, to enter the lineup, to pay us, or to appear in a photo on it. Every entry carries that representation, and any doubt about it escalates to a person before the listing reaches the board, not after.

If a contestant is discovered to be under 18, our policy is settled in advance: the listing is removed, the photo and any avatar made from it are deleted, and the stake is refunded in full. It is the only exit on this site that gives back money we had actually charged, and that is deliberate. A person carries it out — it is a decision, not an automation — but the outcome is not theirs to weigh. If you believe someone on a board is under 18, use the Under 18 report — it goes to the front of the queue.

Every entry confirmation email carries a link to your management page. It asks for a one-time code sent to the email address you paid with — that address is your identity here; there are no passwords, no profiles, and nothing else to log into — and then it offers exactly one action: take your listing down, instantly.

It is irrevocable, and it forfeits your stake. That is money rule 2, and the button says so before you press it. We do not offer a pause, a hide, or a freeze; a listing is either rendered or it is not.

If you have lost access to that email, there is still an exit that needs nobody's permission: rename your handle away from the code we issued. The link stops working, and the listing comes off the board once that is confirmed. The money outcome is the same.

You never went live — rejected, an escalation ended in a no, or you never paid

You are never charged. You were never shown a payment page, or you were shown one and closed it; either way nothing was taken and there is nothing to refund. The only path where money does not move at all.

You take your listing down, or rename your handle away

Forfeited. The position and the stake go together, and the money stays in the pot (money rule 2).

Somebody reports the photo as not yours, and the listing comes off instantly

Forfeited, on the same footing as a removal for cause — the stake stays in the pot while a human investigates the claim. If they find we were wrong, the house can refund it, and on a large stake we would rather do that than argue; but that is our discretion, not a rule you can hold us to. Re-entering is always open, from $0.

We remove you for cause — a violation, a confirmed dead link, an upheld identity claim

Forfeited. But where a large stake comes off the board early and the case is anything less than clear, we would rather refund it than argue about it.

We learn a contestant is under 18

Removed, the photo and any avatar deleted, and the stake refunded in full. The only exit that gives back money we had already charged. Settled in advance; a person carries it out, and none of it is theirs to weigh.

Legal compulsion

Case by case. A court or a law can require something these rules did not anticipate; when that happens we do what is required and we account for the money honestly.

The island shuts down

Stakes bought exposure that was rendered while the show was on the air, so there is no refund on a closed show. We can discontinue the service at any time, with or without notice (Terms section 06), and we are not going to promise a warning we might not be in a position to give.

Whatever the reason, leaving is a real departure: we delete the stored photo and any avatar made from it in the same operation that takes the listing off the board. And the exit is announced the way everything else here is announced — respectfully, in exact dollars. Somebody left the island; their stake stays in the pot.

1. 01Stakes are non-refundable purchases of exposure that is being rendered. Being outranked refunds nothing; that is what all-pay means.
2. 02Delisting forfeits your position and your stake, whether you took it down or we did.
3. 03A dead handle that comes back starts at $0. Stakes never revive.
4. 04A submission that never goes live is never charged. Entering takes no card at all — the photo is checked first, and only an entry that clears is ever shown a checkout. Nothing was taken, so there is nothing to refund.

The full versions, the prices, and the chargeback rule are in Terms section 02. Rank is total dollars staked and nothing else — no viewer action moves it, roses are click counts, and reports are not votes.

The 5-digit code we issue is the only thing we ever ask you to put on your profile, appended to your handle with no separator. It is ordinary profile editing, it names nobody, and it references nothing. That is the entire point of it.

The code is also what protects everyone else. We only ever link to tinder.com/@{handle}{code}, and the digits are always ones this server issued — never digits somebody typed at us. That is what makes a listing entered by somebody who does not own the handle point at a page that does not exist rather than at a stranger. Digits can collide, and we would rather say so: if the coded link happens to open a real profile, the "test your link" step during entry is where it surfaces, and we issue different digits on the spot. And we never contact a dating platform, for any reason, on anyone's behalf: no requests to their servers, no scraping, no copies of their pages. When you press "test your link", it opens in your browser, as you.

1. 01No comments, no direct messages, no viewer accounts. There is no way to contact a contestant through this site at all. The only door off a card is that person's own public dating link, which they chose to hand out.
2. 02City-level location only. A contestant belongs to a market, which is a city. Nothing finer is displayed, stored on the card, or inferable from it. We do not put map pins on people.
3. 03No free text on a card. First name, market, division, stake, roses, photo. There is no field anywhere on the board that a stranger can write a sentence into.
4. 04Small fixed squares. Photos display at about 256 pixels, with no lightbox, no zoom, and no gallery. A smaller surface is a smaller problem.
5. 05No public API, no bulk export. There is no endpoint that hands out a market in bulk and no feed to subscribe to; the board is built for reading, not for harvesting. The endpoints that cost us something — entering, one-time codes, top-ups, the rose redirect — are rate-limited. The board pages themselves are cached and public, and we are not going to describe those as guarded when they are simply cheap to serve.
6. 06No raw IP addresses. Audience counts and roses are de-duplicated per viewer per day using a salted hash of the address; the hash is what gets stored, never the address.
7. 07No personalization. Every market page is identical for every viewer. What you are looking at is what everyone is looking at.

None of this makes a public board risk-free, and we are not going to claim it does. It makes the risks small, named, and answerable by a person — which is the most honest promise a site like this can make.