General Guidelines
People come to marketAfricka to connect with great local businesses. We know that people won’t always agree, but we expect everyone on the site to treat one another and the platform with honesty and respect. We’ve put together these general guidelines to help set the tone for discourse on the site—just in case. Please also read the additional guidelines below for specific types of content that you might contribute to the site.
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- Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are appropriate to the forum. For example, ratings, reviews aren’t the place for rants about political ideologies, a business’s employment practices, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience.
- Inappropriate content: Colorful language and imagery are fine, but there’s no place for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, or other displays of bigotry.
- Conflicts of interest: Your contributions to marketAfricka should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t make complaints or commendations of your own business or employer, your friends’ or relatives’ business, your peers or competitors in your industry, or businesses in your networking group. Businesses should never ask customers to write reviews.
- Privacy: Don’t publicize people’s private information. For instance, please don’t post close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, and don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to someone who is commonly referred to by their full name.
- Promotional content: Don’t post promotional material unless it’s in connection with a marketAfricka advertising product and through a Business Account. Let’s keep the site useful for consumers and not overrun with commercial noise from every user.
- Intellectual property: Don’t swipe content from other sites, users, or businesses. You’re a smart cookie, so write your own copy and share your own photos and videos.
Additional Guidelines
The best reviews are personal, passionate, and reflect your consumer experience. They offer a rich narrative, a wealth of detail, and a helpful tip or two for other consumers. Here are some additional thoughts for conscientious reviewers:
- Personal experience: We want to hear about your firsthand experience, not what you heard from your partner or co-worker, or what you saw in the news. Tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.
- Accuracy: Make sure your review is factually correct. Feel free to air your opinions, but don’t exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We don’t take sides when it comes to factual disputes, so we expect you to stand behind your review.
- Demanding payment: Writing a review should be informative and meant to help the broader marketAfricka community. You should not threaten to post or offer to remove a negative review as a way to extract payment from a business.
- Review updates: Review updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. Don’t keep posting about the same old story you’ve already told. If you’d like to add new insight to an old experience, you may be able to edit your review within 30 days of posting it, else, contact marketAfricka.
Photos and videos should be broadly relevant to the business and reflect the typical consumer experience (e.g., what the business looks like, what the business offers, etc.). If you’re a business, show us what you offer and what makes your business unique. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:
- Keep it relevant to everyone: We may remove a photo or video that showcases a unique personal experience that isn’t relevant to other people (e.g., a receipt or email exchange with a business) from the photo gallery for the business, but it may appear alongside your review if you write one about the business.
- Keep it clean: We don’t want imagery of violence, drug use, nudity, near nudity, or suggestive acts—even if those images are an accurate representation of the business’s services or products.
- Keep it friendly: Don’t use your photos or videos to attack or disparage others. A picture is worth 1,000 words, so it’s best to pick those words carefully and make your point in a review, direct message, or review response.
