Terms of Use

1. What TheTopBoard is

TheTopBoard is a community recommendation platform. Anyone can browse Boards such as “Best Pizza in New York City”. Verified people can recommend one option per Board, and anyone can start a new Board. Options on a Board are ranked by the number of valid recommendations they receive.

2. What rankings mean — and what they don't

• Rankings are determined by valid community recommendations made on TheTopBoard. TheTopBoard does not manually choose winners or positions.
• Rankings reflect community recommendations. They are not reviews, ratings, endorsements, certifications or a measure of objective quality.
• A position on a Board does not mean TheTopBoard recommends, verifies, approves or guarantees any business, product, service or person.
• Counts and rankings change as people recommend, change or remove their recommendations, and may be adjusted when recommendations are held, excluded or merged for integrity reasons.
• Other signals we may display, such as how many times a listing was seen, are informational and never change the ranking.

3. Accounts and verification

• Browsing is open to everyone. To recommend, you verify with a one-time code sent to your email address (and, where offered, your phone number).
• You must provide contact details you are entitled to use and keep your sign-in secure. You are responsible for activity on your account.
• One person may use one account. Creating or controlling multiple accounts to influence rankings is prohibited.
• The Service is not intended for children under 13.

4. Recommendations and integrity

• One person, one recommendation per Board. You may change or remove your recommendation at any time; only your current recommendation counts.
• Recommend only options you genuinely recommend. Recommendations must not be bought, sold, traded, incentivized, automated or coordinated to manipulate a ranking.
• Businesses and their representatives must not recommend themselves in a way that misleads others, or pressure or reward customers for recommendations.
• We use automated and manual checks to protect ranking integrity. We may hold, exclude or remove recommendations and accounts that appear fake, automated, duplicated or manipulative, and we do not have to explain the specific signals involved.
• The Service has no negative reviews or down-votes: people can only recommend.

5. Boards and listings

• Boards may be started by users or by TheTopBoard. Whoever starts a Board — including TheTopBoard — does not control its ranking. Starting a Board does not give you ownership or control of it. The Board belongs to the community, and your public credit is limited to being shown as the person who started it where we display that.
• To keep one canonical Board per topic, Boards that mean the same thing (for example “pizza in NYC” and “Best Pizzas in New York City”) may be detected as duplicates, redirected or merged.
• Listings (the businesses, products, places or services people recommend) may be created by users. Duplicate listings may be merged, in which case recommendations move to the merged listing.
• We may edit titles, descriptions, categories and locations for accuracy and consistency, and may hide, merge or remove Boards or listings.

6. Your content

• You are responsible for what you submit, such as Board topics, listing names, websites and reports (“your content”).
• You keep any rights you have in your content. You grant TheTopBoard a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt (for example to normalize or merge duplicates), publish and distribute your content in connection with operating, improving and promoting the Service. This license continues for content already incorporated into aggregated rankings or other people’s use after you remove it, to the extent needed to operate the Service.
• You confirm that your content does not infringe anyone’s rights and complies with these Terms and the law.

7. Prohibited conduct

You must not:

• manipulate rankings, including with fake, duplicate, purchased, incentivized or automated accounts or recommendations;
• submit content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, sexually explicit, violent or misleading, or that impersonates others;
• target, identify or expose private individuals, or submit other people’s personal data;
• submit spam, advertising disguised as recommendations, malware or links to harmful sites;
• scrape, crawl or copy the Service at a scale that burdens it, or bypass rate limits, security or access controls (normal search-engine indexing that respects robots.txt is welcome);
• interfere with the Service or use it in violation of law.

8. Moderation and enforcement

We may review, hold, edit, hide, merge or remove any Board, listing, recommendation or other content, and may restrict, suspend or close accounts, at our discretion — for example to enforce these Terms, protect ranking integrity, comply with law or protect people. You can report content to us at support@thetopboard.com. We are not obliged to monitor all content.

9. Medical, legal, financial and other professional services

Boards may list doctors, dentists, surgeons, lawyers, financial advisers and other professionals. These rankings are community recommendations only. They are not professional advice, accreditation, licensing verification, or a measure of competence, safety or outcomes. Always verify credentials and licensing yourself, and consult qualified professionals for decisions about your health, legal matters or finances.

10. Third-party businesses and websites

Listings and links refer to third-party businesses, products and websites that TheTopBoard does not own or control. We are not responsible for their content, offers, availability, quality or practices, and any dealings you have with them are solely between you and them. Names and trademarks of third parties belong to their owners and are used to identify them.

11. Our intellectual property

The Service, including its software, design, logo and the TheTopBoard name, is protected by intellectual-property laws. Except for your content and third-party material, you may not copy, modify or distribute the Service without permission, other than sharing links to Boards and quoting reasonable excerpts with attribution.

12. No warranty

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including about accuracy, completeness, reliability, availability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. Rankings, counts and other information may be incomplete, delayed or wrong, and the Service may be interrupted or changed.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, TheTopBoard and its operators will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from or related to your use of, or inability to use, the Service, any content on it, or any business or professional you choose based on it. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable law.

14. Changes and termination

• We may change or discontinue any part of the Service at any time.
• We may update these Terms. We will change the “Last updated” date and, for material changes, give reasonable notice on the Service. Continued use after changes take effect means you accept them.
• You may stop using the Service at any time and ask us to delete your account (see the Privacy Policy). We may suspend or terminate access as described above. Sections that by their nature should survive termination will survive.

15. Contact

Questions about these Terms, or reports about content: support@thetopboard.com.