Community standards

Turn up when you say you will. Pay what you said you'd pay. Confirm it when it lands. Be someone people want to play with.

When you join a paid game your spot is held for 24 hours. Send the PayNow with the reference code, tap I've sent it, and the countdown stops. If you never tap it, the spot goes back on the board and you pick up one strike.

The host then has 48 hours to confirm. If they don't respond in that time your payment is confirmed automatically and your spot is safe. You are never penalised for a host's silence.

A host who lets that clock run out three times in six months has their window cut to 12 hours.

If a host says your payment never arrived, the spot goes back to unpaid, you get a strike, and you get a fresh two-hour window to sort it out with them in the chat. If they were wrong and then confirm you, the strike is removed.

The host marks attendance, and only after the game has finished — not before it starts, and not while it is happening. Marking someone as a no-show records a strike. Changing it back removes the strike.

Players can say what happened too. Once a game has started, anyone who was on it can record that there was no court booked, that the host never turned up, or that the time, court or price was wrong. You can change your mind at any time.

This is the worst thing that can happen on PickleKakis, so it has the sharpest rule. If two different players on the same game say there was no court booked, the host is blocked from charging for games immediately — before anyone reviews it. One player alone does nothing, so a single person with a grudge cannot do this to someone.

They can still host free games while it is looked at. The block is on taking money, not on playing. A second one, ever, and they can never charge for a game again.

New accounts cannot charge at all. You can host free games from the day you join, but to ask people for money you need to have turned up to 3 games run by 3 different hosts. Somebody planning to take S$32 and vanish is not going to spend three evenings earning the right to.

Before you pay anyone, their record is on the game page: how many games they have hosted, how many they cancelled, and whether anyone has ever reported a missing court. A host who has never hosted says so plainly.

Hosts can add their venue booking reference, which puts a Booking confirmed badge on the game. We do not check it — we cannot — but it is easy to check yourself at the venue, and a host who never adds one stands out next to hosts who do.

What we cannot do is get your money back. We never had it. Everything above exists to stop it being worth trying in the first place, because that is the only lever a platform that never touches the money actually has.

You can leave any game, at any time, right up to the start. We used to block it inside two hours. That was a mistake and we removed it: the only thing it achieved was turning people who genuinely could not come into silent no-shows, so the host found out later instead of sooner and the spot was never freed for anyone else.

What replaced it is a record, not a wall.

12 hours or more before the start

Nothing recorded. Leave freely.

Under 12 hours

A late withdrawal goes on your record.

3 late withdrawals or no-shows in 90 days

You can't join games starting within 48 hours. Everything further out stays open, and it clears on its own.

If you paid, leaving does not get your money back automatically — that is between you and the host, the same as everything else on here. Ask them in the chat.

A strike comes from one of these: letting a payment hold expire, a host rejecting a payment you said you'd sent, being marked absent from a game that has finished, or pulling out under 12 hours before the start.

They do not all count for the same thing, on purpose. Money problems bear on whether you can join paid games. Reliability problems bear on whether you can join at short notice. Pulling out late does not lock you out of every paid game in Singapore — one act, one consequence.

1 strike

Nothing happens. It sits there.

2 money strikes within 60 days

No paid games for 30 days from the most recent one. Free games stay open to you.

3 late withdrawals or no-shows in 90 days

No games starting within the next 48 hours.

Older than the window

Stops counting, automatically.

Strikes are not permanent and they are not a record. They stop mattering on their own.

If we issue one by mistake, we take it back and say so. Strikes are never quietly deleted — a reversal is recorded as a reversal, so the mistake stays visible to us even after the consequence is gone. If a bug of ours ever issues strikes that nobody earned, we reverse all of them and tell everyone affected that it was our fault.

You can cancel a game you're hosting at any time, and you should if you have to — but how much notice you give is recorded, because notice is the thing that decides whether anyone else can still salvage their evening.

48 hours or more

Nothing recorded.

12 to 48 hours

One mark on your hosting record.

Under 12 hours

Two marks on your hosting record.

Marks older than 90 days

Stop counting, automatically.

This is about notice, not fault. If the venue cancelled on you an hour beforehand, that is genuinely not your doing — and your four players still have an hour to find a court, which is to say no time at all. We ask for a reason and show it to everyone who joined, because they are owed an explanation. It does not reduce the mark, because we have no way to check any of it yet, and a reason we cannot verify is just a box to tick.

Cancelling a paid game opens a refund for every person who had paid you. Only they can close it — you cannot mark your own debt settled. If one is still open after 3 days it goes on your hosting record, and it is shown to everyone deciding whether to pay you in future. The one thing you can do is say the payment never arrived — marking it unpaid takes the refund off your record, and puts a rejected-claim mark on yours instead, which is also shown. That is the whole enforcement mechanism, and we are not going to pretend it is more than it is: PickleKakis cannot move the money, because we never had it.

The amount and the reference code stay on the game page for both of you so there is something concrete to point at.

Once someone has joined, the time, venue and price are locked. If you need to change one of them, cancel and post again — that way nobody is committed to something different from what they agreed to.

You can remove someone from your game, extend nothing, and you cannot leave your own game — cancel it instead.

We do not decide who is telling the truth. We never hold your money, so we have nothing to hand to either side and no basis for judging between you. That is the honest price of keeping PickleKakis out of the middle, and it is why the reference code matters so much — it is the thing that makes a payment findable in a bank app.

A screenshot is never proof of payment here, in either direction. Fake PayNow confirmations are an active scam in Singapore and the police have said so repeatedly. No image can ever clear a debt in this app.

For a dispute worth more than an argument, Singapore's Small Claims Tribunals hear claims up to S$20,000, the filing fee starts at S$10, and lawyers are not allowed.

Hate speech and slurs. Threats, harassment and bullying. Sexual content — and nothing sexualising a minor, ever. Impersonation. Spam, scams and advertising. Anything illegal in Singapore.

The worst of it is blocked automatically before it posts. Everything else is reportable in one tap, from any profile. We review reports within 48 hours.

Reports about threats, violence, sexual harassment, discrimination, or anyone under 18 suspend the account immediately, before a person has looked at it. A suspended account cannot join, post, chat, rename itself or file reports. We would rather be wrong in that direction and put it right afterwards.

Three things keep that from being a weapon. You can only trigger it about someone you have actually played with — a report about a stranger is recorded and read by a person, but does nothing on its own. One per reporter per month — a second is flagged for review instead of firing. And it expires by itself after 7 days unless we look at it and uphold it, so a mistake costs you days rather than forever.

Deleting your account while suspended is not a way out of it. If you sign up again with the same email address, the suspension comes with you. We do that with a one-way hash and a date, not by keeping your address — the privacy notice explains exactly what is kept.

Reports about rudeness, no-shows, skill or spam take no automatic action at all. Three of them, from three different people, within 90 days flags the account for a human to look at. One person's annoyance is not evidence — and you can only report the same person once per game, so reporting cannot be used as a weapon.

Blocking someone is silent and works both ways: their games vanish from your board and yours vanish from theirs. They are not told.

Email playpicklehub@gmail.com with what happened. A person reads it, and if a rule caught you unfairly we remove the strike or lift the suspension. We'd rather hear about it than have you quietly stop playing.

A one-tap in-app appeal is being built, so that this doesn't depend on you writing an email. Until it ships, the address above is the way.

These are planned, and are not rules yet. They are listed so you can see where this is going, not so you can be held to them.

• • Blind attendance marking. Everyone marks, nobody sees anyone else's marks until the window closes — and a no-show will need a second person who was there to agree with the host before it counts against you.
• • Weather-verified cancellations. If a host cancels for rain, we'll check NEA's own forecast for that area at that time, and a verified one will cost the host nothing.
• • Corroborated no-shows. A no-show flag will need a second person who was there to agree with it before it counts against you.
• • Two no-questions-asked appeals a year, in the app.
• • A minimum-players threshold so an under-filled game cancels itself early instead of leaving the host out of pocket.

playpicklehub@gmail.com