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Community Guidelines

How we keep Spark a calm, respectful, and safe place to date.

Spark is for gay, bi, trans and queer men. These guidelines describe what belongs here, what doesn't, and what happens when someone crosses the line.

They apply everywhere in Spark: your profile, your photos, your messages, your private albums, and anything you share in a chat.

Last updated: 21 August 2026

The short version

Be a person the people here would want to meet.

Two rules cover most of it:

  1. Your public profile is a public space. Keep it free of explicit content — other people see it without choosing to.
  2. In private, ask first. Nudity between two adults who both want it isn't our business. Sending it to someone who didn't ask for it is.

Everything below is the detail behind those two.

Public and private are different, on purpose

Spark treats these as two separate spaces, because the risk is different.

In public — your profile

Your profile photos, your name, your bio and your prompts are shown to people who never asked to see them. They come up while browsing. So this space has firm limits:

Not allowed on a public profile:

Allowed: underwear, swimwear, a towel, gym shots, a shirtless photo. You don't have to be covered up — you have to be non-explicit.

In private — chats and albums

Here, adults decide for themselves. Nudity is allowed in private messages and private albums.

What is never allowed, in private or anywhere:

Consent is the rule that governs this space. Ask before you send something explicit. "They didn't say no" is not the same as "they said yes."

And consent can be withdrawn. Someone who was happy to trade photos last week can stop this week, and someone who agreed to meet can change their mind at the door. Sulking about it is unattractive; pressuring someone about it is a reason to lose your account. What was shared with you was shared for you — it never becomes yours to keep sending on.

How Spark is built to protect that

Some of this is enforced by the app itself rather than left to good manners:

These aren't promises we ask you to trust — they're how the app works.

Nobody under 18

Spark is for adults. You must be 18 or older to have an account, and older where local law requires it.

Any content involving a minor is reported to the authorities and the account is removed permanently. This is not a warning-first rule. If you believe an account belongs to someone underage, report it and choose "Underage" — you don't need to be certain, and reporting is anonymous.

Treat people as people

Spark exists for a community that gets enough hostility elsewhere. Not here.

Not allowed:

Being direct about what you want is fine and welcome. Contempt isn't.

Drugs

Spark isn't a place to buy, sell or advertise drugs, and it isn't a place to make them the point of a meet.

Not allowed:

Mentioning that you drink, smoke, or use cannabis where it's legal is not what this is about. Using Spark as a supply line is.

If someone's use worries you, you're not obliged to handle it alone — block, and report if it crosses into dealing.

When someone is struggling

Talk about mental health belongs here. Some people meet on Spark at the hardest point in their life, and being able to say so matters.

What we do act on is content that encourages self-harm or suicide, or graphic imagery of it on a public profile where people encounter it without choosing to. That's removed — not as punishment, but because a stranger scrolling shouldn't be handed it unprepared.

If you're having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out to a crisis line in your country. In the Netherlands: 113 Zelfmoordpreventie, call 113 or 0800-0113, free, day and night. Elsewhere, the International Association for Suicide Prevention lists services worldwide.

If you're worried about someone you're talking to, you can say so plainly — and you can report the profile so a person on our side looks at it.

Violence and threats

Behaviour outside Spark counts too. If someone uses Spark to arrange a meeting and then assaults, robs or stalks the person they met, we act on the account — and we will cooperate with the authorities.

Someone else's privacy is not yours to spend

This is the section that matters most on an app like this one, because for a lot of people here being known is not a small thing.

Never allowed:

The last two are sextortion, and they are a crime in most countries. If it happens to you: don't pay, keep the messages, report the profile, and go to the police. You have done nothing wrong.

Spark itself is built around this — screenshots inside chats are detected and the other person is told, private albums are shared deliberately and can be taken back, and your distance is never shown precisely enough to find you.

Be who you say you are

A discreet profile is fine — a face you don't show, a name that isn't the one on your passport. Discretion and dishonesty aren't the same thing: the first is protecting yourself, the second is misleading someone else.

Spark doesn't currently show a verification badge. We'd rather show nothing than a badge that promises more checking than we actually do. If that changes, we'll explain exactly what it checks and how.

Not a marketplace

What happens when something is reported

How to report: open the profile or the conversation, choose Report, and pick a reason. Reporting is anonymous — the person you report is never told who reported them, or that a report was made at all.

What you'll hear back. You get a confirmation the moment your report reaches us. We don't write back with what we decided, and that's deliberate: if we told you the outcome each time, you'd gradually be able to work out who was acted on and who wasn't — which is exactly the thing anonymity is meant to prevent. Report it, and let it go; it's with us.

What we look at. When something is reported, we review the reported content, and where it's needed to understand what happened, the surrounding context. We look at private messages only when they've been reported to us or where the law requires it — not routinely, and not to browse.

Something to be clear about, because other apps aren't: Spark's messages are encrypted in transit and in storage, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. That means Spark can technically read message content, and does so only in the situations above. We would rather tell you that plainly than let a word like "encrypted" imply something stronger than what we do.

What can happen: the content is removed, or the account is warned, suspended, or permanently removed.

Not everything is a suspension. Plenty of what gets reported is someone having a bad day rather than someone who doesn't belong here, and for that there's a warning: the next time you open Spark you'll see what was reported and why it isn't okay, you tap to acknowledge it, and you carry on. Nothing is restricted, nobody else can see it, and it isn't a strike that expires. We do keep a record, so if it happens again we know you've already been told.

How you'll know. If your account is suspended or removed, Spark tells you in the app the next time you open it: what happened, how long it lasts, and how to appeal. We tell you there rather than by email, because it's the one place we can be sure reaches you — plenty of members sign in with Apple's Hide My Email and we have no real address for them.

Before a permanent removal, you get 14 days — and it's a deadline, not a grace period. An account being removed for good is first suspended, and only actually deleted once those 14 days are up. Until then an appeal can undo it completely. After that the account and everything in it — your profile, your conversations, your photos, your matches — is gone for good, and we can't bring it back even if we later agree the decision was wrong. If you want to appeal, do it inside those two weeks.

The exception: anything involving a minor, credible threats, or non-consensual content is removed immediately, and reported to the authorities where appropriate. No notice period, no waiting.

If you think we got it wrong, email support@hi-spark.app and ask us to look again. Tell us what happened — we'll take another look.

The report button is a safety tool, not a weapon. Reporting someone because they turned you down, because you disagreed, or to get at someone you know offline is itself a misuse of Spark, and repeated false reports cost you your own account. Being wrong in good faith is fine — nobody is expected to be certain before reporting, and we'd far rather look at ten reports that came to nothing than miss the one that mattered.

Blocking

Blocking is separate from reporting and needs no reason. It stops someone from seeing you or messaging you anywhere in Spark, it's instant, it's free, and they're never told. You can undo it from Privacy settings.

Report when a rule was broken; block when you'd simply rather not.

Your safety comes first

Getting in touch

Questions, reports of something these guidelines don't cover, or an appeal: support@hi-spark.app

Spark is built on the idea that a dating app should protect people at the moments they're most exposed. These guidelines are part of that, and they'll change as we learn. When they do, we'll say so here.