Account Requirements and Guidelines

We are very dedicated and successful at advertising the great works provided by Clowns like you. It is the focus of this website. It is our goal to provide an advertising medium that is as equally fair as possible and as equally beneficial as possible to all Clowns and we have rules/guidelines all of which are designed to improve the clowning community's experience with the advertising service provided by ClownsForHire.com. Over time, it is likely that you will see evolution with this list of requirements depending on how things work out, system abuse, etc. We reserve the right to make changes to the requirements and to determine what is or is not allowable content. All existing as well as future requirements are and will be required of all Clowns registered with the site (regardless of when they registered). 

Please understand and respect our efforts to maintain fairness and the quality of the website's content, service, and public usability. Our goal is to bring you more business! To proceed, please carefully read the following Account Requirements and Guidelines.

Topics:

• Completing and maintaining the profile questionnaire as it is intended to be
• Textual content of your Description of Services and Photo Captions
• Textual Content must be Positive Towards Clowning and it must be Family-friendly
• Adding photos to your account
• One clown advertised per account - no agencies, booking services, associations, groups, etc.
• Family / child-friendly content only
• Contact info must be unique for each account
  

Allowable or Not Allowable:

• Creating an account for agencies, booking services, associations, groups, etc is not allowed
• Using all capital letters in your clown's name is not allowed
• Using all capital letters in your city's name is not allowed
• Your email address must be valid and properly working
• Publicly displaying your website address or email address on your profile is not allowed (however, it is required in your account information)
• Entering programming code (ie: html, xml, javascript, etc) into any question fields is not allowed

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Completing and maintaining the profile questionnaire as it is intended to be
It is a requirement that all of the questions that require providing information on the registration form are to be completed as they are obviously intended to be. Entering information that does not correctly address what is being asked for is not allowed and will not be tolerated. The following are a few examples of unallowable answers:

• Entering "call me" in the Email Address box

• Entering "LA area" in the City box (when you should be entering "Burbank", or "Los Angeles", etc.)

• Entering your website address in a phone number box

Textual Content of your Description of Services and Photo Captions
It Your textual content for your Description of Services must be unique and not "copied" from other Clowns' advertisements. Each Photo Caption in your advertisement must be unique. In other words, it is not allowable to "copy and paste" the same photo caption or Description of Services - they must be sufficiently unique. We reserve the right to determine to whether or not they are unique enough. It is important to understand that this is an an issue when professionally (and creatively) written, can be a great benefit to you. Your Description of Services and Photo Captions are where you "sell" your services. They are areas where you can communicate your Clown personality. Providing your prospective customer with quality content and making them smile and laugh can really benefit you!

Textual Content must be Positive Towards Clowning and it must be Family-friendly
Creating textual content which is does not make clowning look good or which has a less than positive "slant" to it is not allowed. Negative reference to other Clowns' types of attire, makeup, etc. is also not allowed. The following are important topics to understand:

• All textual content must be positive about Clowning and those who are enthusiasts of it

• Negative (or even marginally negative) textual content is not allowed and will not be tolerated.

• Negative words such as fear, fearful, afraid, scary, scared, frighten, frightening, and other negative or similar words are not allowed regardless of the context in which they are used.

• Negative content about "the look" of certain types of clowns will not be tolerated.

• All textual content must be very "clean" and very family-friendly.

• All content must be child-friendly.

• Each photo description (photo caption) must be clearly unique. They cannot be duplicates or closely similar to each other.

Adding photos to your account
RECOMMENDATION: See Photo Guidelines & Requirements
Click here for assistance with converting photos (or existing files of electronic images) to electronic format to be used in your account. The following is a list of requirements of any photos that you include in your profile:

• Acceptable electronic file formats: .jpg, .jpeg, .gif

• Photos must be less than 32k electronic file size or the system will not accept them.

• Your photos must advertise the services of only your clown character(s) (not booking agencies, clowning companies, etc)

• Not contain advertising (signage, text, etc) which advertises a product or service other than the service of your own clown character.

• Photo/image content must clearly be of or directly about the subject respective Clown that the account promotes (no "filler" content). It must be visually clear (not relatively clear) what the photo content is (without reading the photo caption). Photos with marginal clarity are not allowed. They must be reasonably sized (not too small and not too large).

• They must be clear, not "grainy" or pixelated. The idea here is to provide photos that make your clown character look good. They must be about your clown character and they must not be poor quality. You want your photos to provide the "picture is worth a thousand words" effect with prospective customers. Poor or marginally quality photos do not achieve this. We reserve the right to determine what is or is not a poor quality photo.

• They must be "normal" pictures of your clown services. They cannot be odd (weird, bizarre, etc) to any degree and they cannot contain any type of distorted images or figures.

• Photo/image content must be suitable for families and appropriately child-friendly - characteristically "clean and wholesome".

• Cannot be used more than one (1) time in the same account. Any photos that you add to your account which are larger than approximately 4" wide by 4" tall will be reduced to about this size. The programming of the site automatically reduces them and it cannot "see" what the quality of the photo looks like after the size reduction. Therefore, be sure to view your photos after uploading them to make sure that they are not distorted when/if they are programmatically reduced.

One clown advertised per account - no agencies, booking services, associations, groups, etc.
Please note that in an effort to maintain fairness to all Clowns registered on ClownsForHire.com, one of our requirements is that we allow only one clown to be advertised or promoted per account - not more than one, a group, association, agency, booking service, party planning service, company, etc. Rarely are exceptions made for this requirement. The following are examples of words/wording which will cause your description of services (DOS) or a photo description/caption to be removed: we, our, us, company, agency, agent, firm, booking company, booking business, booking agency, booking agent, booking firm, our company, our business, our firm, etc.
An account with more than one clown gives that particular account an advantage of scheduling availability over an account with only one clown. This is an unfair advantage. Please understand and respect this. We make a strong effort to create maximum fairness to all Clowns who advertise their services on our site. If you are affiliated with other Clowns who would like to advertise their services also, feel free to have them register individually also! <top>

Family / child-friendly content only
If you haven't already noticed, we are very focused on maintaining a very high level of family-friendly, child-safe content on this site. The majority of our traffic is made up of parents who are searching in their area for clowns for various types of parties, of which a large percentage are children's parties. Also frequently searching this site are people looking for clowns to entertain at family-friendly events such as holiday events, church-related events, public street festivals, corporate events, etc. We are not flexible about maintaining this site with content that is moral, clean, and wholesome, as defined by what we consider to be conservative, traditional family-friendly / child-friendliness. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE WHAT IS OR IS NOT APPROPRIATE CONTENT FOR THIS SITE. Please respect our efforts and comply with our requirements. <top>

Contact info must be unique for each account
The system checks for this. It is permissible to have more than one active account. However, it is not permissible to have more than one account that contains one or more of the same contact info (ie: phone number, email address, etc.) as another account. <top>

Creating an account for agencies, booking services, associations, groups, etc is not allowed.
We only allow one clown to be advertised or promoted per account. The intent of the site is to promote the services offered by individual clowns - not those offered by a group, association, agency, booking service, party planning service, company, etc. There will rarely be exceptions to this rule. Contact us by calling for more information, if needed. <top>

Using all capital letters in your clown's name is not allowed
It is not allowable to use all capital letters for any word in your clown name, regardless of the length of the word or whether or not it is an abbreviation, salutation, special denotation, etc. However, it is allowable to capitalize the first letter of each word in your name.

Allowable: Happy The Clown, Happy the clown, happy the clown, Happy the Clown, etc.
Not Allowable: HAPPY THE CLOWN, HAPPY the CLOWN, HAPPY the clown, Happy THE CLOWN, Happy The CLOWN <top>

Using all capital letters in your city/town name is not allowed
It is not allowable to use all capital letters in your city's/town's name regardless of the length of the word or whether or not it is an abbreviation, special denotation, etc. However, it is allowable to capitalize the first letter of each word of the city/town name.
Allowable: New York City, New York city, New york city, new york city
Not Allowable NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK City, NEW York City, New YORK City, New York CITY, etc. <top>

Your Email Address must be Valid and Properly Working
Are you sure you have the proper email address entered into your account? This is a VERY common mistake made by many Clowns. If your email address is not properly working, you will not receive "Contact via Email" messages sent to you by prospective customers. <top>

Publicly displaying your website address or email address on your profile is not allowed.
Website addresses which route people out of the ClownsForHire.com website are not allowed. Other unallowable textual content, regarding other web addresses, is the instance when the composition hints or infers that the reader should visit another website address. The first several years of business taught us very well that allowing other web addresses to be posted or accessible from Clowns' profiles does NOT help that clown get the job! Our study of literally hundreds of the clown's prospective customers show that they want professional photos to see what you look like, they want an ample (very informative and professional) Description of Services, and contact info (phone number, email contact, etc). All of this information about you, the Clown, is available through your clown account profile, that is, assuming that you professionally manage your account. Note that the system rewards those who do professionally manage their accounts by allowing them to rank higher in the clown search results (higher ranking in the search results brings more traffic than lower rankings). <top>

Entering programming code (ie: html, xml, javascript, perl, etc) into any information field is not allowed
It is not allowable to enter any kind of programming code of any type (ie: html, xml, javascript, perl, etc) into any field in the questionnaire forms of your account, Description of Services, description of photos, etc. This can cause problems with our system. We closely monitor for this. Typically without any advanced notice, we will delete an account that has not followed this rule. <top>

IMPORTANT NOTE:
By continuing with the registration process and/or maintaining an account with ClownsForHire.com, you are agreeing to comply with all of the following requirements as well as those in the User Agreement or other Legal Statements. Please note that this ClownsForHire.com is privately owned and controlled. We reserve the right to determine what is or is not allowable content on this site. There are no exceptions to our content policies. If we find, or are made aware of inappropriate content in an account, that account will likely be immediately deleted without notification.

I understand and agree to comply with these requirements as long as I advertise on ClownsForHire.com.

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