Community guidelines

Draft. Sikhaku has not launched. These are the standards the founding cohort is being onboarded against.

The short version

A marketplace is worth exactly as much as the worst thing on it. Nobody browses a catalogue where a third of the courses are padding — they leave, and the good creators leave with them. So the bar is set at the start, when it is still possible to set one.

These guidelines are about quality. The acceptable use policy covers what is not allowed at all; this page covers what is merely not good enough.

What a course has to clear

• It teaches something specific. A viewer should be able to do something afterwards they could not do before, and the course page should say plainly what that is.
• It is watchable. Audio you can follow without straining, video you can read text on, and a phone screen it works on — most of your students are on a mid-range Android.
• It is structured. Lessons in a sensible order, each doing one thing, named for what it covers rather than “Part 4”.
• It is not padded. Length is not value. A tight two hours beats a wandering six, and we would rather promote the two.
• It is yours. Your material, your voice, your examples — or licensed, with the licence to hand.
• Its previews are representative. Free lessons should be typical of the course, not the only polished ones in it.

How review works

A person watches the first course from every creator before it can be sold. Not skimmed — watched, in enough depth to tell teaching from filler. That takes a couple of working days and it is the reason the founding cohort is being kept small.

Once you have a course through review, later ones publish without waiting. We come back to them on report or on signal: a spike in refunds, a run of low ratings, a complaint that the material is not the creator’s own.

Rejections come with reasons and specifics. “Not a good fit” is not a reason, and you should never receive one from us.

Promises and pricing

You set your own price, and we do not discount your work platform-wide without asking you first. In exchange, the course page has to be honest: describe the material, not the life it will supposedly produce. No invented testimonials, no fabricated student counts, no countdown that resets when the page reloads.

If you publish updates to a course later, students who already bought it get them. Selling the same material again as a new course is not an update.

What we ask of students

• Ask questions in good faith. Creators are teaching, not on call — an answer within a few days is reasonable.
• Do not demand free access, extra material, or a refund as leverage in a disagreement. The refund policy is a policy, not a negotiation.
• Keep what you bought to yourself. Sharing a login ends the licence.
• Report a course that is not what it claimed rather than only rating it one star. We can act on a report.

Ratings and reviews

Only someone who bought a course can review it, and reviews are published unedited unless they break the acceptable use policy. Creators cannot delete a review they dislike, and they cannot pay to have one removed.

Manipulating ratings — buying them, trading them, pressuring students, or reviewing your own work from a second account — is treated as seriously as stealing content, because both are ways of making a course look like something it is not.

We publish completion rate alongside rating. A five-star course nobody finishes is telling you something a rating alone will not.

Reports and appeals

Report anything to support@sikhaku.com with a link and a sentence. We acknowledge within two working days and tell you what we decided, not just that we looked.

Every enforcement decision can be appealed, and an appeal is read by someone other than whoever made the original call. We get things wrong; the process assumes it.

When a course is removed, students who bought it keep access wherever we are able to allow it, and are refunded where we are not. Enforcement is aimed at the creator, not at the people who paid in good faith.