Founder and Referral Terms

• CLI-Games maintains 1,000 active numbered Founder places. It automatically awards the lowest available place at the first trusted account-confirmation boundary, normally email confirmation or a verified sign-in provider. An unverified signup does not hold a place.
• A Founder number and matching Founder Key are one award. A Bug Hunter Key is separate and does not affect Founder eligibility.
• Founder status belongs to the receiving account. It cannot be sold, transferred, combined with another account, or redeemed for cash.
• A place removed for abuse returns to the available Founder pool and may be assigned to a later valid account.
• Because returned places can be reassigned, more than 1,000 accounts may appear in the historical assignment record over time, but no more than 1,000 accounts can actively hold numbered places at once. Availability can also change between signup and confirmation.
• A limited set of legacy accounts received provisional places under an earlier signup-time system. An unconfirmed legacy place may still be reclaimed after its original seven-day grace period; new signups never receive provisional places.

• A Founder account in good standing will not be served advertising on CLI-Games while signed in, for as long as CLI-Games operates.
• Ad-free covers all advertising inventory, including house ads, third-party ads, sponsored messages, promoted placements, and paid advertising. Authentication, security, service, and transactional notices are not ads; neither is ordinary editorial or game content that is not promoting a product, service, or campaign.
• The guarantee does not include membership, storage, assessments, Clide usage, themes, cosmetics, or another paid feature unless separately stated.
• Introducing or changing memberships does not cancel a valid Founder account's lifetime ad-free guarantee.

• A Founder with a verified account email may create referrals without a lifetime cap, subject to reasonable issuance limits and limits on simultaneously active codes.
• Each new referral is a generic code shown to the Founder once. The Founder shares it privately; CLI-Games does not request the recipient's address or send a referral invitation. The first account to reserve the code controls it.
• A code expires 30 days after issuance and works once. Entering it during signup reserves it to that account; confirming the account email before expiration consumes it. A reserved code is not available to another account, and an account confirmed after expiration receives no referral grant.
• Signup remains open without a referral. A referral grants an ad benefit; it is not permission to create an account.
• A confirmed referral grants 12 months without ads beginning at that account's email-confirmation time. If the account also receives an available Founder place at confirmation, the stronger lifetime guarantee applies while the 12-month grant remains recorded as a fallback.
• A referral has no cash value and does not include membership.

• Do not create or control duplicate accounts to reserve Founder places or referral benefits, invite yourself through alternate addresses, automate account or referral creation, send unsolicited referrals in bulk, sell codes, evade rate limits, or provide materially false account information.
• We may review account, referral, verification, timing, network, and security records reasonably necessary to detect program abuse.
• After review, we may invalidate unused referrals, revoke improperly obtained ad-free grants, remove a Founder number and Key, and return that place to the pool.
• Existing referral recipients are reviewed on their own facts rather than automatically penalized for the inviter's conduct.
• Ordinary use of more than one personal email address is not by itself a violation. The question is whether accounts were created or controlled to manipulate the program.

If you believe Founder status or a referral benefit was removed in error, contact [email protected] from the account email. Include the username and relevant referral details. We will review the available records and reply with the result.

We may change code lifetimes, issuance rate limits, security checks, and other procedural mechanics to keep the program reliable and prevent abuse. Those changes will not convert a valid Founder account's lifetime ad-free guarantee into a paid membership requirement.

These terms supplement the general Terms of Service. If they conflict with a general rule about virtual items, these terms control for the Founder ad-free guarantee and Founder referrals.