People visit SokoMjinga to find and connect with great African Diaspora local businesses. While we know users won't always agree, we expect everyone on our platform to treat others—and SokoMjinga itself—with honesty and respect. These guidelines set the tone for all content you contribute to the site. Please read the sections below, especially the specific rules for Reviews, Photos and Videos, and Community Interactions.
1. General Guidelines
These rules apply to all content posted on SokoMjinga:
- Relevance: All contributions must be appropriate for the forum. For example, reviews are not the place for political rants, discussions about a business’s internal employment practices, or comments on extraordinary circumstances that don't address the core consumer experience.
- Inappropriate Content: We welcome colorful language, but we have zero tolerance for threats, harassment, hate speech, lewdness, or any displays of bigotry.
- Conflicts of Interest: Your content must be unbiased and objective. You must not review your own business, your employer, your friends' or relatives' businesses, or competitors. Businesses must never ask customers to write reviews.
- Privacy: Do not publish private information about other people. This includes posting close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, or posting people's full names (unless they are a public figure commonly referred to by their full name).
- Promotional Content: Do not post promotional material unless you are using a SokoMjinga advertising product through an authorized Business Account. Keep the site useful for consumers, not overrun with commercial pitches from individual users.
- Post Your Own Content: Do not copy content from other sites, users, or businesses. Write your own text and only share your own photos and videos. This also means you must not use chatbots or other AI tools to create, draft, or revise reviews.
2. Review Guidelines
The best reviews are personal, passionate, and detailed. They reflect your actual consumer experience and offer helpful tips to others.
- Personal Experience: We want to hear about your firsthand experience, not a secondhand story from a friend or something you saw in the news. State facts and observations clearly, avoiding broad generalizations or mere accusations.
- Accuracy: Your review must be factually correct. You are free to air your opinions, but do not exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We expect you to stand behind the facts stated in your review.
- Demanding Payment: Reviews are meant to inform the SokoMjinga community. You must not threaten to post or offer to remove a negative review to extract payment or other compensation from a business.
- Review Updates: Updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. If you just want to add insight to an old experience, you can edit your existing review within 30 days of posting it.
3. Photo and Video Guidelines
All media should be relevant to the business and represent a typical consumer experience (e.g., what the business looks like, what it offers). Businesses should use media to showcase their unique offerings.
- Keep it Relevant to Everyone: We may remove photos or videos that showcase a unique personal experience not relevant to other customers (like a receipt or a private email exchange) from the main business photo gallery. It may still appear alongside your written review, however.
- Keep it Clean: Do not post imagery of violence, drug use, nudity, near nudity, or suggestive acts, even if those images accurately represent the business's services or products.
- Keep it Friendly: Do not use your photos or videos to attack or disparage others. If you need to express criticism, it is best to make your point clearly and carefully in a review or message.
4. Community Guidelines
Use your account profile to provide clear, trustworthy information about yourself. Users prefer reading content from peers they know and trust, not anonymous or hostile accounts.
- User Profiles: Transparency is important. Anonymous users who disrupt the community will be treated more sternly. While we encourage you to personalize your profile, do not use it to attack competitors, other reviewers, or SokoMjinga. Do not seed your profile with keywords, special offers, or promotions; we will remove them.
- Consumer Messaging: Do not use the messaging feature to harass other users or send other inappropriate content. Consumer accounts are strictly for personal, non-commercial use only.
- Business Messaging: Businesses should use their free Business Account to message reviewers. Do not use direct messages or public comments to launch personal attacks or offer incentives to change a review. We encourage business representatives to upload a clear photo of themselves to personalize communication.
- Ask the Community: When asking questions about a business, keep them relevant to others, avoid loaded questions or presumptions, and maintain a civil tone. Questions should be clear and provide enough context to get meaningful answers. For broader topics like "what is the best Ethiopian food in town," use the community's general discussion forum.