Teacher Community Guidelines

We are building quite a wonderful Obby community. We think that reviews, messaging and email are a great way to build a strong and health Obby community for our teachers. We have created these guidelines to keep things honest, clean and real when speaking to other Obby teachers, students and the Obby Team.

So, in the name of a healthy, positive community, here are our guidelines:

The good stuff:

How to get the best Obby experience

1. Get stuck in. Whatever you have to say, chances are there’s someone out there who will benefit from your personal first-hand experiences, knowledge and opinions. Share them all—good or bad—and include as many facts and details as you can.

2. Be constructive. 

3. Be courteous. We are a diverse community of people with diverse opinions. Speaking to and about people with respect means that everyone feels free to have their say.

4. Speak the Queen’s English. Your contributions are your voice on Obby, so make sure those smooth, dulcet tones ring out by being as clear, descriptive and typo-free as possible.

5. Get down to business. On Obby, every teacher has the opportunity to represent themselves in the best possible light. So, have an active presence in the community—give recommendations and add extra content to your listing. Make the most of the chance speak directly to your customers, patch up any misunderstandings that might crop up and, best of all, build a loyal fan base.

The naughty stuff:

How to get yourself struck off our Christmas card list

1. Don’t be a phoney. Setting up and using a fake profile to submit content, especially to promote your school of classes or criticise another teachers or their classes, is absolutely not permitted. If you misrepresent who you are, claim false credentials or expertise, give potentially harmful advice or mislead people in any other way you could be breaking the law.

2. Keep the peace. Obby is not the place for threats, personal attacks, aggressive comments or hateful, bigoted or racist speech. We are a community of people with diverse beliefs, opinions and backgrounds, so please be respectful.

3. Don’t talk dirty. We want to keep things clean, which means no swear words, no vulgar comments, no sexually explicit language or images and no lewd propositions. Also, please don’t write entirely in CAPS—it may be big, but it’s not clever.

4. No spam. Any obvious advertising references found in reviews, comments or other content will be deleted immediately. It is not permitted to post links, HTML, provide phone numbers, email addresses or to provide information that is unrelated to the topic in order to solicit personal or financial gain. It’s also forbidden to send bulk messages or submit any other unauthorised content with the purpose of promoting your business or product.

5. Excessive cancellation or disruption of classes. We understand that sometimes classes need to be cancelled for reasons out of your control. However, if we notice consistent class cancellations and ongoing student disruption then we will, at our sole discretion, put your partnership with Obby under review.

6. Keeping it legal. We don’t want to call in the boys in blue, so make sure you don’t break the law by:

• submitting fake reviews or paying someone to submit content that benefits your school or class

• copying other people’s content without permission or proper attribution—please be aware of copyright laws

• scamming people into sharing personal information

• stealing or borrowing anything from Obby or other sites (like copyright or trademark material)

• breaking or hacking into private unauthorised places, especially if it’s with the intention of causing harm or stealing information

• threatening, slandering, making libellous statements, harassing, invading people’s privacy or impersonating others

We are committed to doing everything we can to protect Obby from fake reviews. On the rare occasion that we do find bogus content, spam, fake reviews or submissions from fraudulent profiles, we remove them immediately and take steps to ensure that the businesses and users in question are penalised in our rankings on Obby.

If you are a business owner, commissioning reviews violates the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD), and the UK UCPD. This means companies and sole traders cannot pay someone else to post reviews or write blogs about their own companies without fully disclosing the fact. Both civil and criminal penalties are possible.

When we have to step in:

Obby does not edit the content of reviews, comments or other user generated content on Obby. However, we reserve the right to remove content that we determine to be inappropriate and/or in violation of the Obby community guidelines. Depending on the level of offence, violating the community guidelines may result in the termination of your Obby account without warning.

These community guidelines were written with the best interests of the Obby community in mind. If you have any additional suggestions on how to improve them, or any other feedback, please send us an email at hello@obby.co.uk.