What These Guidelines Are
These guidelines say how we run Stage Africa as a place people share, and what we expect of you while you are here. They cover everything you put on the site, including your directory entry and the pictures on it, and everything you post on our forum at forum.stage.africa.
Our terms of use are the agreement between us and they say what you may and may not do. These guidelines say how we apply them: what we step in about, what we leave alone, and what happens when somebody goes too far. Where the two ever disagree, the terms win.
Stage Africa is run by us. It is not a public square and we are not obliged to carry everything anybody wants to say. We built it for people who work in the performing arts in South Africa, and we moderate it towards being useful to them.
We would rather ask you to stop than remove anything. Most of what goes wrong here will be handled by somebody asking you to leave a thread alone or to take a sentence out, and that is the end of it. The rules below say what we act on, and they are how we usually decide rather than a list we apply without thinking. A person reads every report and a person makes the call.
We will nearly always warn you first. We do not warn the same person twice for the same thing.
One thing about the forum is worth knowing before you start rather than when you leave. A post you make there stays in its thread, because other people reply to it and taking it away takes their replies out of sense. What you can always do is have your name taken off your posts, which we will do for the asking and offer you when you close your account on the site. Our terms of use set that out in full, under What you publish here.
The Forum Is Public
Read this part even if you read nothing else, because it is the thing people get wrong.
Our forum is open to the world, apart from the private rooms of groups. Anybody can read the rest without an account, search engines index it, and what you post there can be found by your students, your employer, a producer you are about to audition for, and anyone who searches your name. Outside a private room, a post on the forum is as public as an article we publish. A file you attach to a post or a chat message can be opened by anyone who has its address, wherever you posted it.
Posting needs a Stage Africa account, and your Stage Africa account is the only way in. The forum has no separate login.
So write as though the room has no door, because it has none. Do not put anything on the public forum that you would mind a stranger reading, and do not put anything there on somebody else' behalf that they would mind a stranger reading.
The forum has areas open to everybody, and each has its own rooms. Groups have rooms of their own, which Groups, and what private means covers. Front of House is for announcements, the conversation about our stories, questions, and what is on. The Studio is for the work itself, by discipline and by teaching. Backstage is for auditions and jobs, productions and venues, festivals, and the business of the arts. The Green Room is for everything else. Post in the room that fits, and a moderator will move a topic rather than remove it when it lands in the wrong one.
Every story we publish gets one topic in Stories, opened by us, and the conversation about that story happens there rather than under the story itself.
How to Behave Here
This is a small field and people work with each other again. Most of what follows is what you would do anyway.
Argue with what somebody said, not with who they are. You can call a production weak, a syllabus outdated or a decision wrong, and say so plainly. Calling the person stupid is a different act, and it is the one we step in about. A review that would be at home in a newspaper is fine here; the same view with an insult attached is not.
Say who you are when it matters. If you are writing about your own studio, your own show or your own competitor, say so in the post. We do not mind you promoting your work in the rooms meant for it. We mind you doing it while appearing to be a disinterested bystander.
Do not post another person's private information. That covers a home address, a phone number, an identity number, a medical detail, a photograph of them, and anything else they have not put in public themselves. It applies to people who are not here and cannot answer.
Do not repeat what was said in a private room. Anything posted or chatted in a group's private room, or sent to you in a personal message or a personal chat, stays there unless the person who wrote it agrees.
Take a complaint about a person to us rather than to the forum. Allegations about somebody's conduct, above all where a minor or an abuse of position is involved, are serious, and a public thread is the worst available place for them. Write to us and we will deal with it, and we will tell you what we can. You are also free to go to the police or to a professional body, and nothing here asks you not to.
One account each, and it is yours. Do not create a second account, do not post as somebody else, and do not come back under a new name if we have suspended you.
Edit to correct yourself, not to cover your tracks. You have ten minutes to fix a post freely. After that, editing or deleting to remove something a moderator has taken up, or to make a thread unreadable after you started it, is itself something we act on.
You may use a machine to help you write, and what you post is yours. Nobody here minds a spellchecker, a translation, or a model that helped you get a difficult paragraph out. What we do expect is that you read it, that you agree with it, and that you can stand behind every fact in it. Posting something a machine produced and you did not check is your mistake, not its.
You must not use AI to show a real person as they were not, in a picture, a voice or a video, unless that person agreed to it, and for anybody under 18 it is their parent or guardian who agrees. That includes a voice made to sound like a known actor. Your directory headshot must look like you do today, because a casting director calls you in on it, and you may touch it up, restyle it or change what you are wearing in it with any tool.
What Stays Out
Three things are out at launch, and they are our choice rather than the law's.
Party politics. There is no shortage of places to argue about it and we are not going to be one of them. A political decision that lands on the arts, an arts budget or a funding policy, is on topic in The Business of the Arts.
Buying and selling between members. We are not a marketplace, we carry no payment between members, and we have nothing to offer you if a deal goes wrong. Advertising a job or an audition is a different thing and has its own room.
Sharing photographs as an activity of its own. You can put pictures on your directory entry and you can attach one to a post where it belongs in the conversation. A room for posting photographs is something we may add later, and it needs more thought about the people in them than we have given it.
These three can change. If one of them opens, this page says so before it does.
Then there is what stays out permanently, because it is unlawful, because it does real harm, or because we will not host it:
- Anything unlawful, and anything that encourages somebody else to break the law.
- Hate directed at people for who they are, harassment of a person, threats, and incitement to violence.
- Sexual material, and anything sexualising a child. Material showing the sexual abuse of a child is reported to the police, and the account is suspended at once and for good, with what it holds kept for the police.
- Material that infringes somebody's copyright, including a script, a score, a recording or a photograph that is not yours to post.
- Spam, and anything posted to manipulate the site rather than to talk to anybody. An account posting spam goes at once and without a warning.
- Scams, fake auditions, and any request for money that is dressed as an opportunity.
- Impersonating a person, a company, a school or us.
- Statements about a person that you know to be untrue and that would damage them.
Photographs, and the People in Them
Most photographs in the performing arts are of people, and the person in a photograph is usually not the person who owns it.
Before you post a photograph, be sure that it is yours to post and that everybody in it is willing to appear. Where anybody in it is under 18, their parent or guardian is the one who has to agree, and nobody else can agree for them.
Is it yours to post? A photograph belongs to whoever took it. A picture from your show taken by a photographer you hired is not yours unless your agreement with them says it is, and a picture you found is not yours at all.
Are the people in it willing to appear? They are not, if they have never been asked.
What you put on your directory entry is covered by our terms of use, under Photographs of other people, which is where you answer the ownership question and where we keep your answer. Read that part before you upload.
The forum asks you nothing. When you attach a picture to a post there is no question and no tick box, so both of those answers are yours alone and we have no record that you considered either. The rule is the same and the only thing holding it up is you.
We are not checking. We do not know who is in your photographs, who took them, or who their parents are, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Anybody in a photograph can have it taken down by asking, and a parent or guardian can do that for a child. Write to privacy@stage.africa and say which picture. You do not have to prove anything or explain why, and a photograph of a child comes down within two working days.
If you are not sure, do not post it. Nobody here will think less of you for it.
Groups, and What Private Means
A group is a set of members with a page of its own on the site and a room of its own on our forum, where they post and chat. Only the people in the group, whoever runs it, and our moderators can post or chat in the room, and when the room is private, only they can read it.
An organisation group belongs to a directory entry. Somebody who looks after the entry makes it from the entry's page once the entry is published, and the people who look after the entry run the group and moderate its room. A company uses one for its troupe, a school for its admin team. The room is private unless they open it. Anybody can read an open room, and the entry's page lists its group.
Any member can make a friend group, from their account page, and its room is always private. Whoever makes it runs it, and can let anybody in it run it too. It can name an entry in the directory as the place its members meet, such as a studio. Naming a place tells nobody there, and the people who look after that entry cannot see the group or its room unless they join it. The group's page says that the place does not run it, because a group named after a place is easily mistaken for a group belonging to that place.
We are an organisation too, and our own groups work the same way.
People join a group through a link, or when we add them. Whoever runs the group makes a link and shares it wherever their people are. A link works for seven days or until it is withdrawn, and anybody with an account who opens it in that time can join. While a link works, whoever runs the group can see who joined through it, so that they can find and take out somebody the link was forwarded to. If you run a group and take somebody out, withdraw any link that still works, because it can bring them back.
The people in a group and whoever runs it can see who is in it, and so can we. The page of a group whose room is open shows anybody its name and its entry.
You can leave a group whenever you like, and whoever runs a group can take you out of it. Nothing tells you when they do. What you posted stays in the room when you leave. Closing your account takes you out of every group. When the last person running a friend group leaves it, is taken out of it, or closes their account, the member who has been in it longest runs it from then on, and the group's page says so. A friend group with nobody left in it is deleted, and its room stays on our forum until a moderator takes it down.
A private room is private from other members, and not from us. Our moderators can read every room on our forum, and every group's room says so on the room itself. The people who look after an organisation can read, post, and chat in its rooms as well, because the rooms belong to it. A file or picture attached to a post or a chat message in a private room can be opened by anybody who has its address, as it can anywhere on our forum.
So a private room is the right place for a rehearsal schedule, a cast list, or an argument you would rather not have in front of the whole field. It is the wrong place for anything you would not want us to see, and it is the wrong place to hide something.
Nobody under 18 holds a Stage Africa account, so a group for a junior troupe holds that troupe's teachers and the children's parents or guardians. It does not hold the children. If your group is about children, the adults responsible for those children are the members of it.
Auditions and Jobs
An audition call is where a performer is most easily taken advantage of. It asks somebody to give up a day, to travel, sometimes to pay, and it is made by somebody they have no way of checking. Every predatory scheme aimed at performers is shaped like an audition notice.
So one room works differently. In Auditions and Jobs, a topic can only be opened by somebody we have confirmed looks after a directory entry. Anybody can reply. It does not make a listing true, and we are not vouching for the work, the money, or the people. It means that a name and an organisation stand behind every call, and that if one turns out to be a fiction we know whose entry it came from.
If you are casting, ask us from your entry's page before you post here. We check that the organisation is yours to speak for, from what it has already published: an address at its own domain, the contact it publishes on its own site or page, or its own site naming you. Anything you send us yourself counts only beside one of those. If you do not have an entry, add or claim one first, and an entry you add goes up once one of us has read it. That is the whole of the barrier and it exists so that there is something to find you by afterwards.
If you are answering a call, two things are worth keeping in mind, and they hold anywhere. A legitimate audition does not ask you to pay to attend. A legitimate audition does not need your identity number, your banking details or a photograph in your underwear before you have met anybody.
Tell us about any call that asks for one of those, whether it is on this forum or not. Reporting something on the forum is covered under Reporting something, and what we do about it.
Reporting Something, and What We Do about It
Tell us when something is wrong here. We would rather hear about ten things that turn out to be fine than miss the one that is not.
Write to us at community@stage.africa. That reaches us wherever the problem is, on the site or on the forum, and it works from your first day here.
On the forum you can also flag a post, which is the quicker route and sends it straight to the moderators. A brand new account can use only one flag, Illegal, and that is the one for a scam or a fake audition. The other flags come after a little reading. Until then, use the address for anything else.
Report a photograph of you, or of your child, to privacy@stage.africa, which is covered under Photographs, and the people in them. That one is not a moderation question and it does not wait its turn.
Tell us what you saw and where. You do not have to argue the case or quote a rule at us.
What happens next. A person reads it. We look at the post, the thread around it, and what has happened before, because the same words can be a joke between two people who know each other and an attack between two who do not. Then we do one of these, and usually the first:
- Nothing, because it is within what we allow even if you did not enjoy it.
- Ask the person to change or remove something, or move the topic somewhere it fits.
- Remove the post, and tell the person why.
- Suspend the account for a time.
- Suspend the account for good, or close it, which we do for something serious on its own or for somebody who keeps coming back to the same behaviour after being asked to stop.
We tell the person we acted against what they did and why, unless telling them would put somebody at risk. We do not tell you what we did about your report, because that is somebody else' business, but we will tell you that it was dealt with.
We do not publish who reported what. If somebody works it out from the circumstances we cannot help that, and it is a reason to use the e-mail address rather than a reply in the thread.
If you think we got it wrong, write to community@stage.africa and say so. Riaan Burger reads those himself. Arguing about a moderator's decision in the thread where it happened is the one appeal that does not work.
Some things go further than us. We report material showing the sexual abuse of a child to the police. Where somebody is in danger we will act on that first and worry about the forum afterwards.
Version 1.0, effective 21 September 2026.