Community guidelines

vawu.chat exists for one reason: high-quality information and discussion for people building in and for Africa. Everything below serves that goal.

What belongs here

• Links and write-ups about technology, engineering, products and company building.
• Original projects — Show us what you built, including the messy parts.
• Questions you have genuinely tried to answer yourself.
• Discussions where the goal is understanding, not winning.
• Local context: payments, infrastructure, regulation, languages, mobile-first realities.

What does not

• Engagement bait, outrage farming, or titles that do not describe the content.
• Undisclosed promotion of your own product or employer.
• Recruiter spam, affiliate links, and URL shorteners.
• Personal attacks, harassment, or bigotry. This is not a debate club for whether people deserve respect.
• Low-effort AI-generated comments dumped into threads you did not read.
• Crypto pump content, referral schemes and get-rich-quick posts.

Votes

There are no downvotes here. Upvote things that are genuinely useful, interesting or well-argued — not things you merely agree with. Votes feed the ranking and the reputation of contributors.

Reputation and trust

Reputation is earned when your submissions and comments are upvoted, and it is capped per item: one viral post cannot make you permanently immune to moderation. Reputation unlocks higher posting limits and, eventually, the ability to flag content and suggest tags. It cannot be bought, and there is no leaderboard.

Moderation

Moderation actions are logged and the public log is at /modlog. Moderators do not secretly edit your words: content is hidden or removed with a reason, you are notified, and the action stays in the audit trail. Private moderator notes are the only exception, and they exist to keep users safe, not to rewrite history.

If you believe a moderation decision is wrong, reply to the notification or email [email protected]. A different moderator will review it.

Privacy and deletion

You can delete your own submissions and comments. Deleted comments leave a tombstone so conversations keep their shape; their body is cleared. Deleted submissions disappear from feeds and search.

The weekly rhythm

A forum is a habit before it is a product. These are the rituals worth keeping, and they only work if people actually show up for them.

• Monday — what shipped. Post the thing you released, however small. A changelog entry counts.
• Wednesday — what broke. The outage, the bad migration, the integration that lied to you. Write-ups of failures are the most useful posts here and the rarest anywhere else.
• Friday — what you are stuck on. Ask the question you have been avoiding asking. Someone here has hit it.
• Any day — read before you post. Two good comments are worth more to this community than a link nobody discusses.

The spirit of the thing

Assume good faith, bring receipts, and write the comment you would want to read. If this community becomes another place where the loudest take wins, we have failed.