Welcome To Our Community Blog

Welcome to the South Africa community on Google+ blog. The purpose of this blog is to elaborate some of the rules and the purpose of the community. Please see the top menu for more information. This community is an unofficial community and not officially affiliated with the South African government.

Rules

1. How it works

1.1 The moderators will exercise their discretion when deciding on what constitutes marketing content, partly due to the fact that advertisers who are aware of rules may try to bend them to accomplish their goals. The spirit of the rules are secondary to their letter however.

1.2 Moderators are under no obligation to follow any rule stipulated here. The purpose of these rules are to provide a guideline for moderators to decide on which content should be allowed and a guideline for people who would like to post or who have found their posts removed.

A community should serve its members. People join a community because it has content relevant to them. It is important for us to keep our content relevant, focused, and high quality. Most importantly the community should provide South African people to express themselves. People come first.

2. Relevance

The topic of the South Africa community is to provide a place for people to share and discuss the country The Republic of South Africa. This means that

2.1 Current events, photos of places in South Africa, political discussion, art, history and culture are all good topics. The community is moderated to keep it as relevant as possible to South Africans. A good guideline when posting is to ask whether a post will apply widely to South Africans. The more local or specific something is to you, the less relevant it will be to other South Africans or people exploring South Africa via our community.

2.2 If something can apply broadly to anyone and has no direct relationship with South Africa specifically a post is not relevant.

3. Advertising

Advertising is not permitted. We know that it is tempting to post directly to your target market that resides in our community, however advertising is not allowed.

3.1. This includes:

3.1.1 advertising for any products or services, free or paid.
3.1.2 Content that is dressed up to look substantive but represents thinly veiled advertising. For example a post about the top five foot spas in South Africa from a website that sells foot spas will not be permitted.

3.2 There are some exceptions. Businesses are allowed to post as long as the post contains content relevant to the topic (South Africa). A travel agency may for instance post a blog entry about good holiday spots in South Africa, but may not simply post adverts for their business. The advertising rule is fairly strictly enforced. The reasoning is simple. It would not be fair to allow some advertisers and to discriminate against others. It is therefore preferable to disallow advertising. Google has specific channels for advertising that are better suited than social media posts.

4. Behaviour

4.1 Certain types of behaviour can get you removed from the community. Behaviour such as:
4.1.1 Using abusive language
4.1.2 Racism, sexism, or hate speech against any group or person
4.1.3 Posting of content that is deemed obscene, unless there is a fair warning and the obscene content is not displayed directly. Such content must be posted as commentary and not for its own sake. Posting of pornography or graphic violence for its own sake or in order to distress members of the community is not allowed.
4.1.4 Disrespectful behaviour that continues despite warnings from moderators. Anything that needs to be said can be said with respect and consideration toward others.