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Community Guidelines

Last updated 5 August 2026

ShowUp puts real people in the same real place. These guidelines exist so that everyone who turns up is glad they did. They apply everywhere in the app — your profile, your events, and every message you send.

Community norms

ShowUp is not a dating app

ShowUp is for meeting people through activities — a run, a coffee, a game of football. It is not a dating or hookup platform. Do not use events, profiles, or chats to solicit romantic or sexual contact, and do not treat someone joining your event as an expression of interest in you. If you want to ask someone out after meeting them, that is between the two of you — but the app is not the place to shop for it.

Talk to people the way you would face to face

Harassment, bullying, intimidation, threats, and deliberate humiliation are not allowed. This includes persistent unwanted contact after someone has asked you to stop, and piling on someone in an event chat. Disagreeing with someone is fine. Making them feel unsafe is not.

No hate speech

Content that attacks, dehumanises, or promotes exclusion of people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, medical condition, age, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation is removed, and the account behind it is usually removed with it. There is no version of this rule with exceptions for jokes.

Be who you say you are

Use your real first name or the name people actually call you, and a photo that is recognisably you. Impersonating another person, inventing a persona, or running an account on behalf of someone who is not you undermines the one thing that makes meeting a stranger from the internet reasonable: that they are who their profile says they are.

Keep content appropriate

No sexually explicit or suggestive photos, no graphic violence, no shock content. This applies to profile photos, event titles and descriptions, and chat messages equally.

Prohibited content and conduct

The following will get content removed and, depending on severity, your account suspended or permanently banned:

  • Violence and threats — threatening, encouraging, organising, or glorifying violence against anyone, including yourself.
  • Sexual content — explicit material, sexual solicitation, or unsolicited sexual messages.
  • Anything involving minors — sexualised content involving minors, attempts to contact or meet minors, or soliciting personal information from them. This is reported to the relevant authorities, not just removed.
  • Illegal activity — organising or promoting the sale of drugs, weapons, stolen goods, or any other unlawful activity through events or chats.
  • Fraud and scams — requesting money, investment schemes, crypto pitches, fake giveaways, phishing, or any attempt to get financial information out of another user.
  • Commercial spam — using events to advertise a business, sell tickets, promote another platform, or harvest contacts. A genuine gathering that happens to be at your café is fine; an event that is really an advert is not.
  • Spam and manipulation — repetitive posting, bulk-created events, multiple accounts, or attempts to game visibility, notifications, or the reporting system.
  • Self-harm content — encouraging or instructing others toward self-harm, suicide, or disordered eating. If you are struggling, the support resources on our safety page list places that can help.
  • Misusing other people's information — sharing someone's address, phone number, workplace, or photographs without their consent.

Profiles

  • Use a clear photo that actually shows your face. Group photos, logos, cartoons, and heavily filtered images make it hard for anyone to recognise you when you turn up.
  • You must not be a minor in the jurisdiction in which you reside. This mirrors the requirement in our Terms of Use. Accounts we believe belong to minors are removed.
  • Do not put your home address, phone number, financial details, or other contact information in your bio. Your bio is visible to people you have not met.
  • One person, one account.

Chats

Every event has a chat for the people attending it. It exists to sort out the practical details — where exactly, what to bring, who is running late.

  • Keep conversation relevant to the event and the people in it.
  • Do not share your home address, exact daily routine, financial details, or identity documents.
  • Nobody in a ShowUp chat has a legitimate reason to ask you for money, bank details, or a payment app handle. Treat any such request as a scam and report it.
  • Keep conversation in the app until you have met and are comfortable moving elsewhere. Chats stay in ShowUp, which means moderation and reporting still apply to them.

Chats are moderated automatically. Messages are screened against several categories of harmful content — including threats, sexual content, hate speech, scam patterns, and attempts to solicit contact from minors — and flagged for human review. Deliberately obfuscating a word to slip past that screening is treated as evidence of intent, not as a clever workaround.

Hosting and joining events

If you are hosting

  • Be accurate. The title, description, time, and location must describe what will actually happen. People make travel plans around your pin.
  • Pick a public place. Meeting points should be public and, where possible, well lit. Do not set an event at your home address, and do not ask attendees to come to a private residence they have not been to before.
  • Show up to your own event. If you have to cancel, delete the event or tell the chat as early as you can. People are travelling to meet you.
  • Say what it costs. If there is an entry fee, a court booking, or a round of drinks involved, put it in the description so nobody is surprised.
  • Follow the law and the venue's rules where your event takes place. You are responsible for what you organise.
  • Invite-only events are still covered by these guidelines. A private guest list changes who can see the event, not what is allowed at it.

If you are joining

  • Only join if you intend to turn up. The whole app is built on the assumption that a "going" means something.
  • Leave the event in the app if your plans change, so the host and everyone else can see the real numbers.
  • Arrive roughly on time, and pay your share of anything shared.
  • Be welcoming to whoever else turns up. Someone at their first event, in a new city, or on their own, will decide whether to ever do this again based on how the group treats them.

We do not vet, background-check, or verify the people who host or join events. Read the safety tips before you meet anyone for the first time.

Blocking and reporting

Blocking stops another person contacting you or seeing your activity. It is private — they are not told — and you do not need a reason or anyone's permission.

Reporting sends the matter to us for review. Report a person, an event, or an individual message. The reasons available are:

  • Reporting a person or a message — spam, harassment, inappropriate content, disruptive behaviour at events, fake profile, or other.
  • Reporting an event — fake event, harmful or dangerous intent, spam or scam, harassment or targeting someone, inappropriate content, or other.

Reports are confidential. The person you report is not shown who reported them. Choose the closest reason and add detail where the form allows it — a report that explains what happened is acted on faster than one that does not.

Do not file reports you know to be untrue. Using the reporting system to punish someone you have fallen out with is itself a violation, and repeat false reporting is grounds for removal.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first.In Latvia and across the EU that is 112. Reporting inside the app is not a substitute for calling for help — tell us afterwards.

What happens when rules are broken

We review every report. What follows depends on what happened, whether it looks deliberate, and whether it has happened before:

  • A warning, for a first minor breach where the intent looks careless rather than malicious.
  • Content removal — a message, an event, a photo, or a bio taken down.
  • Suspension — temporary loss of access, typically for hosting or chat.
  • Permanent ban — for severe breaches, or a pattern of smaller ones. Anything involving minors, credible threats of violence, or sexual misconduct goes straight here.

Some breaches are also reported to law enforcement. Where the law requires it, we cooperate with police and regulators.

Reports are retained for 24 months so that a pattern of behaviour across several complaints is visible rather than lost. This retention survives account deletion: deleting your account removes your profile from the app, but does not erase reports already made about you. See the Privacy Policy for what we keep and why.

If you believe an enforcement decision about your account was wrong, email us at robnovdev@gmail.com and we will review it.

Contact

Questions about these guidelines, or something you have seen in the app that does not fit neatly into a report? Email robnovdev@gmail.com.

These guidelines sit alongside our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Where a guideline and the Terms appear to disagree, the Terms govern. We update this page as the app changes; the date at the top tells you when it last happened.