虎扑 (Hupu)

RegionChina

Platform · this deep dive is built from the official pages of the platform itself and of the tools that support it.

Overview

虎扑 (Hǔpū, "Hupu") is a Chinese community built around sport and men's interests. It describes itself as a community site devoted primarily to sporting events and men's life: NBA schedules and broadcasts, news, player transfers, football, the English Premier League, esports, the LPL, plus the community service "步行街". 步行街 (Bùxíngjiē, "Pedestrian Street") is the platform's best-known section: what is discussed there is no longer only sport.

Structurally this is a classic forum with post ratings, not a feed of bloggers. Users call each other JR, and the platform has internal currencies and paid membership. The operator is named in the agreement: it is 上海匡慧网络科技有限公司 (Shànghǎi Kuānghuì Wǎngluò Kējì Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī, "Shanghai Kuanghui Network Technology Co., Ltd.") and its affiliates. The mobile version lists the registration 沪ICP备2021021198号-6 in its footer.

Who's here

Hupu does not publish audience figures on its public pages.

What is known for certain is the make-up and the rules. The personal data guide places the app in the category of "online communities" and describes the basic service as discussing topics, exchanging information and interacting through follows in blogs, forums and communities, where the necessary personal information is the registered user's mobile phone number.

Geography inside China is visible to everyone: the platform states that the profile, threads and comments show the place a message was posted from — within the country down to a province, autonomous region or city, abroad down to a country or region, based on carrier data. The interface language is Chinese; there is no language marker in the home page markup.

Getting started

You can register with a phone number, through the carrier's "one-tap login", or through a third-party account. The guide explains the logic: a phone number is the information required to satisfy the state requirement for real names online; without one you can browse and search anonymously, but you cannot post, comment or rate. If you signed in through a third-party service, the number will still be collected separately when you want to publish a post, a comment or a rating.

A separate procedure is identity confirmation. It is needed for official account verification, author verification, restoring access, risk control, withdrawing funds and protecting minors; what is collected is your real name, an identity document and a photo of it, an address, and information about qualifications and organization.

The limits on accounts are worth knowing in advance. The agreement forbids registering several accounts on the same identity confirmation data (including cases where Hupu establishes that the actual owner of several accounts is one person), registering accounts frequently or in bulk, and creating fictitious accounts. There is also an inactivity rule: if after registering you did not sign in for the first time in time, or have not signed in for more than a year in a row, Hupu may withdraw the right to use the account or restrict features without separate notice and without your consent.

What you can publish

The formats are the usual ones for a forum: text, images, audio and video, comments, ratings. The agreement records something important for anyone running several platforms: you agree that everything published under your Hupu account is automatically published in sync to other programs and sites of Hupu, its affiliates and third parties, and that your edits and deletions are synced there too.

Moderation is stated openly: to comply with the requirements of the law and with obligations to manage the online content ecosystem, content is checked by machine and by hand.

The community rules are a separate long document. It opens with values: abide by the constitution and the laws, follow socialist core values, promote patriotism and collectivism, uphold state unity, ethnic accord, religious peace and social stability. Then come the prohibitions: politically sensitive topics, pornography and vulgarity, gory and terrorist content, attacks and stirring up quarrels, rumours and fakes, and malicious actions.

There are requirements specific to a forum that are useful in practice: a repost must contain a link to the source, and the tag "zt" must be added to the headline; what is forbidden is "begging for ratings" — devices of the kind "upvote if you agree" or "if I get 500 upvotes I'll do such-and-such". Nicknames and avatars are covered separately: names of an advertising nature are not registered, and signatures and avatars with advertising, external links or QR codes are removed by force.

How to grow

Hupu does not publicly describe how its feed ranking works — it is not on the pages we checked. What is described outright is what to do about advertising, and that is the main practical conclusion for an outside party.

The "advertising activity" section of the rules opens unambiguously: publishing advertising requires the platform's permission; you can get in touch about advertising and commercial cooperation through the "contact us" section. Without permission, what is forbidden includes:

The door for authors is nevertheless left ajar. The same section carries a proviso: Hupu welcomes quality, original and lawful content from self-operated media; for WeChat public accounts, Sohu accounts, Weibo accounts and the like that meet these conditions, the restriction on the QR code of a non-commercial public account does not apply, and such material is not subject to action. The proviso is narrowed immediately: material from competing or rights-infringing platforms may be acted on, and Hupu is entitled to decide for itself whether content belongs to a competitor.

Manipulation practices are banned separately. The rules name outright any form of inflating 虎扑币, H币 and 虎扑豆 coins, buying and selling accounts and the rights within them, malicious registration of clones, and inflating recommendations, "upvotes" and complaints, as well as fan practices: mass ratings, complaints, recommendations and reply creation organized by groups. The punishment for this is described harshly: confiscation of all virtual currency obtained in violation, and a block on all linked accounts across the whole site.

The platform has named a contact for commercial cooperation publicly: in answer to a user's question in the complaints section, Hupu support replied that for business cooperation you can write to [email protected] (the reply is dated 11 November 2023).

Path to monetization

Hupu promises no payouts to authors for posts on any of the pages we checked. The platform's economics are described in the agreement from the user's side: the list of services includes 虎扑会员 (Hupu membership), 虎扑币 and H币 — that is, a paid subscription and internal currencies, along with various value-added services. A separate "Membership Services Agreement" is named as an integral part of the user agreement.

There is an indirect sign that payouts exist in the system: in the personal data guide, identity confirmation is required among other things for withdrawing funds. But none of the public pages names the conditions, thresholds or rates.

One more restriction, important for brands: the agreement states outright that the services Hupu provides are intended for non-commercial use only, and without Hupu's prior written consent they may not be used for commercial purposes.

Tools and automation

There is no public programming interface and no developer section on the pages we checked. The agreement prohibits using any software, plugins, add-ons, systems or third-party tools not authorized by Hupu that interfere with the normal operation of the service, break it, change it or otherwise affect it, as well as reverse engineering, disassembly and decompilation.

As of the check date, the robots.txt file did not ban crawling outright but listed search robots (Googlebot, Baiduspider, bingbot, YisouSpider, Sosospider, Sogou's robots) with a crawl delay of 5 seconds.

The practical conclusion: work with the platform is manual, and everything commercial goes through an arrangement with the platform.

Limits and rules

Real names. Without a phone number you cannot post, comment or rate.
One person, one account. Several accounts on the same data, and bulk or frequent registration, are forbidden.
Account inactivity. More than a year without signing in and the right to use the account may be withdrawn.
Advertising. Only with the platform's permission.
Non-commercial use. Commercial use only with Hupu's written consent.
The ladder of blocks. The rules describe three levels of punishment, where the second is a cumulative block on a scale of 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 30 days and onward, applying in the section where the rules were broken, and the third is a permanent block.
Time limit. As a rule, complaints about content older than 10 days are not considered — except for breaches of the law and threats to the platform's security.
Revision dates. The user agreement is marked as published on 31 May 2026 and effective from 1 June 2026; the personal data guide — 11 and 15 August 2025; the community rules are dated 14 April 2021.

Who it's for

It suits sports media, teams, leagues, kit manufacturers and esports brands working the Chinese market — but only through an official arrangement with the platform. The audience here is topical and engaged, and the discussion revolves around matches, transfers and analysis.

It suits an author who can produce original analysis and translations: the rules explicitly welcome quality original content from self-operated media and do not pursue you for a QR code of a non-commercial WeChat public account under such material.

It does not suit fast guerrilla promotion: advertising without permission, external links, download QR codes, QQ and WeChat numbers are forbidden, and inflating ratings and recommendations is punished with a block across the whole site. It does not suit a foreign team without a Chinese legal entity and phone number: without a number you cannot even comment. It does not suit automation: there is no programming interface, and third-party tools are banned by the agreement.

Verified data

The checked data this deep dive rests on.

Restrictions

READ WRONGLY: on 28 July only the beginning of the file was read and it was recorded that crawling was not forbidden entirely. Re-read in full on 7 August: the last two lines are «User-agent:*» and «Disallow:/», that is, our crawler is forbidden the whole site. On 9 August 2026 all 27 facts collected on that basis were WITHDRAWN and moved to the log of withdrawn facts: acknowledging the error without putting it right would have left the catalogue the one place where it acts against its own rule

Correction of an error of our own, not a change on the platform: the order of the lines in the file did not change. On the basis of the wrong entry, 21 facts were read from hupu.com pages on 28 July — they are marked separately. That information can be recollected only with the platform's permission; until then the catalogue knows of Hupu only that its robots.txt forbids crawling entirely.

source, checked 2026-08-07

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