SkillUp Africa Community
How we treat each other
SkillUp Africa Community works because people who already worked something out come back and tell the next person. These are the few rules that keep that possible.
The point of this place
Most people here are learning something difficult while doing everything else in their life. Somebody asking an obvious question has taken a risk. Answer them the way you would have wanted to be answered when you did not know either.
What we ask
- Be useful
- Answer what was actually asked. "Google it" helps nobody. If you only half know, say which half — that is still worth more than silence.
- Be straight about what you know
- There is no shame in "I am not sure". There is real harm in confident advice that turns out to be wrong, because somebody will act on it.
- Disagree with the idea
- Argue with what somebody said. Do not go after who they are — their background, their level, their English, their accent, their beliefs.
- Keep it in the right place
- A course space is for that course. Stuck on a particular lesson? Ask inside the lesson instead — a trainer sees those.
- Look after other people's privacy
- Do not post somebody else's phone number, address, workplace or photograph. Do not paste a private conversation into a public space.
What is not allowed here
- Harassment, threats, intimidation, or following somebody around the platform.
- Attacks on people for their ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, age or origin.
- Scams. Asking for money, fake job offers, "investment" schemes, crypto doubling.
- Selling. Promoting your own paid course, service or product.
- Sexual content, graphic violence, and anything you would not put in front of a 17-year-old on one of our programmes.
- Spam: the same message everywhere, link dumping, or posting to be seen rather than to say something.
- Pretending to be somebody else, including a member of SkillUp Africa staff.
- Asking a young person to move a conversation off the platform.
If you are worried about somebody
If you think a young person is at risk, or somebody is being threatened, or somebody sounds like they might hurt themselves, report it and choose "Someone may be at risk". That does not go to the ordinary moderators. It goes straight to our safeguarding team, and the people who deal with spam and rudeness never see it.
If somebody is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. We are not an emergency service, and we cannot reach somebody faster than the people who can.
Reporting, blocking and muting
Every post and reply has a Report control. A moderator reads what you send, and the person you reported is never told who reported them. You can also mute a member — you stop seeing what they write, and they are told nothing — or block them, which means neither of you sees the other anywhere in Community. Both are yours to undo at any time.
What a moderator can do
A moderator can leave something alone, remove it, or stop somebody posting for a while. Every one of those decisions is recorded with who made it, when, and why — and if it was about something you wrote, you are told the reason. A decision nobody can explain is not a decision we take.
Reports are worked through by how serious they are and how long they have waited. They are deliberately not ordered by how many people reported the same thing. A pile-on is not evidence, and one person reporting something dangerous should not wait behind fifty people reporting something rude.
If you think we got it wrong
Reply to the notification you were sent, or write to help@skillup.africa. Say what was decided and why you think it was wrong. Somebody will look again.