Acceptable Use & Community Guidelines

1. Who these rules apply to

These guidelines apply to everyone who uses AfricanDiscountFoods: buyers, sellers, recipe authors, reviewers and visitors. They form part of the Terms of Use and, for sellers, the Seller Agreement. Breaking them can lead to content removal, restriction or loss of your account, and in serious cases to reports to authorities.

2. Reviews and ratings

Do

• Review only products you have actually bought or eaten. A “verified purchase” label is added automatically when your account email matches a paid order containing the product.
• Describe your genuine experience: taste, freshness, packaging, portion, delivery. Specific detail helps other buyers and sellers.
• Give the seller a chance to fix a problem through your order page; you can update your review afterwards (resubmitting replaces your earlier review).

Don't

• Post reviews for products you did not buy, reviews written by or for a seller, or reviews in exchange for payment, refunds, discounts, free products or any other incentive.
• Review your own products, your competitors' products, or products from a store you have a personal or financial connection with, without saying so.
• Include personal information about anyone (full names of staff, phone numbers, addresses), threats, insults, profanity, or comments about a seller's ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender or other protected characteristic.
• Use a review to complain about something unrelated to the product (for example carrier delays) or to promote another store, website or service.
• Post the same review many times, use multiple accounts, or use automation.

We display ratings as an unrounded average that updates with each review. We remove reviews that break these rules and may remove the reviewer's other reviews if a pattern of abuse appears. Sellers cannot pay to remove reviews. Under consumer law in the EU, UK and many other places, fake reviews and undisclosed paid reviews are unlawful, and we cooperate with regulators investigating them.

3. Recipes, stories and community posts

• Share recipes you have the right to share. Traditional recipes are part of a shared heritage and welcome; copying another author's text or photos word-for-word, or copying from a cookbook or website without permission, is not.
• Credit the people who taught you where you can, and be respectful when a dish is claimed by more than one culture or country.
• Use a real display name or a consistent pen name; do not impersonate a chef, brand, public figure or another user.
• Recipes must be food recipes. No instructions for making alcohol, drugs, medicines, weapons or anything dangerous; no “remedies” presented as cures.
• Include safety information where it matters (for example that a bean must be fully cooked, or that a dish contains a common allergen), and never advise anyone to consume something unsafe.
• No advertising or affiliate links, no political or religious campaigning, no fundraising, no adult content.
• Ingredient links to marketplace products are a convenience for cooks; picking a product is not an endorsement by us.

4. Store and listing content

The Seller Agreement sets the full standard. In short: accurate names, real photos, complete allergen and origin information, truthful claims, no prohibited items, no off-platform payment instructions, and nothing that infringes a trademark or copyright.

5. Conduct towards other people

• Be courteous to sellers, buyers and our team. Harassment, threats, hate speech, discrimination, doxxing and sexual content are prohibited everywhere on the platform, including in order messages, emails and support tickets.
• Do not contact another user for any purpose other than the order that connects you, and do not use contact details from an order for marketing or personal contact.
• Do not attempt to move a sale, payment or conversation off the platform to avoid fees, taxes, records or buyer protection.
• Do not pressure a buyer to withdraw a claim or change a review, and do not threaten a seller with a review to obtain something you are not entitled to.

6. Illegal and harmful content

The following are prohibited without exception and are reported to authorities where the law requires:

• Content that is illegal in the country it is posted from or directed to, including incitement to violence, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, and the sale of illegal goods;
• Fraud, scams, phishing, pyramid or “investment” schemes, counterfeit goods, and money laundering;
• Content that infringes copyright, trademark, database, design or privacy rights;
• Malware, exploits, or content designed to break or probe the platform;
• Misinformation about food safety, allergens, nutrition or health that could lead to harm;
• Content involving cruelty to animals, or products from protected species.

7. Technical and fair-use rules

• Do not scrape, crawl, mirror, bulk-download or systematically extract listings, prices, photos, reviews, recipes or user data, whether by hand, script or AI agent, except through ordinary search-engine indexing that respects our robots directives.
• Do not use the platform, its content or its AI features to train, fine-tune, evaluate or benchmark machine-learning models without our written consent.
• Do not probe, scan or test the security of the platform, bypass rate limits, authentication or the Content-Security-Policy, or attempt to access another user's account or data. If you find a vulnerability, report it responsibly to privacy@africandiscountfoods.com; we will not pursue good-faith researchers who respect users' data and give us reasonable time to fix issues.
• Do not create accounts automatically, share an account, or create a new account to evade a suspension.
• Do not overload the platform (for example with automated basket manipulation or search floods) or interfere with other users' access.
• Do not try to extract system prompts, hidden instructions or model details from AI features, or use them to generate prohibited content.

8. AI-assisted content

• Sellers may use our AI tools (or their own) to draft descriptions and taglines, but must review the result and are fully responsible for its accuracy. AI must not be used to invent certifications, origins, awards, ingredients or testimonials.
• AI-generated or heavily edited product photos must not misrepresent the actual product. Where practicable, say that an image is illustrative.
• Reviews and recipes must be your own genuine experience and words; wholly AI-generated reviews are treated as fake.

9. How we moderate

• Detection. We use automated checks (keyword and structure screening and, where enabled, an AI model) on stores and content, and we act on reports from users, rights-holders, trusted flaggers and authorities. Automated systems can flag and, for stores, grant a verified badge; they do not remove content or suspend accounts on their own.
• Actions. Depending on severity and history we may: leave content up with a note; edit or hide it; remove it; remove a badge; demote a store; restrict features (for example reviewing); suspend temporarily; or terminate an account. We act proportionately, considering context, intent, harm, and whether the person has been warned before.
• Notice. When we remove or restrict your content or account we tell you what we did, why, which rule or law applied, whether automated tools were involved, and how to appeal, unless the law prevents it or the content was manifestly illegal.
• Appeals. You can appeal within six months to legal@africandiscountfoods.com. A person not involved in the original decision reviews it, usually within 14 days, and can reverse it. People who reported content can appeal a decision not to act.
• Repeat behaviour. Frequent breaches, evasion of suspensions, and repeated infringement of others' rights lead to termination. Frequent manifestly unfounded reports may lead to a temporary suspension of reporting rights.
• Emergencies. Content that poses an imminent risk to life or safety, or that is clearly illegal, may be removed immediately and reported to law enforcement.

10. Reporting

To report content, a store, a review or a user, use the Report Content & Legal Notices page. For urgent food-safety concerns email support@africandiscountfoods.com with “FOOD SAFETY” in the subject line. For anything involving immediate danger, contact local emergency services first.