A marketplace that lets anyone put a line in a developer’s terminal has to earn trust on both sides. waitline’s moderation is built around one principle: protect the developer’s terminal without bouncing advertisers’ money around. Here’s how it works.
Always take payment, then decide
When an advertiser creates a campaign, payment is always collected first. Moderation then decides only one thing: serve now, or hold for review. It never auto-rejects at creation, and it never refuses to take warm payment — converting prepaid value into internal account credit is better for everyone than a chargeback dance. (For the advertiser’s view, see reaching developers in the wait line.)
A layered engine
Each creative passes through layers:
- Structural / terminal-safety — control characters, ANSI escapes, zero-width text, and unsafe URLs (non-https, IP hosts, embedded credentials, punycode) are caught here.
- Denylist — banned terms, blocked domains, and display-vs-link-domain mismatches.
- Trust gating — a trusted advertiser with a clean creative serves immediately; a new advertiser, or anything the layers flag, is routed to pending review with the reason recorded.
Nothing risky reaches a terminal unreviewed.
Reject means credit, not a bounce
If a human reviewer does reject a campaign, that’s an admin action — and it converts the campaign’s value to account credit rather than a cash refund. The advertiser isn’t out the money; the creative just doesn’t run until it’s cleared. Blocked accounts (genuine bad actors) can’t create campaigns at all, so we never take their money in the first place.
Defense in depth at serve time
Review catches the obvious. The last line of defense catches mistakes: every creative is sanitized again at serve time and in the client, so even a human-approved ad can only ever render as one clean, plain line — never an instruction to your terminal. That’s the same guarantee behind why waitline is safe.
The result: advertisers get a fair, payment-first process, and developers get a terminal that stays clean even when a reviewer is human and humans miss things.