Hello and welcome on our website. We are so happy to see you here and hope you’ll have a good time connecting to others who share your love for African music and dance. When you’ve landed here, on this page, we assume that you agreed to all the policies that are in place for this website. If not, please make sure to first read the pages under the header Information in the footer of the website (so all the way down).
We hope this website is pretty self-evident in its use, but just to be sure we have written this manual for you to peruse. Through time, this document will probably expand as we learn more about your needs. So, do come around her again if you feel you need more information. Something that wasn’t here before might well be now. And in those cases that you cannot find what you are looking for and really need our help: you can always contact us through the form on the About us page. That’s also the place to go if you have a good idea for this website.
Why we started this website? Well, first of all because we love its subject matter ourselves. We are true fanatics and can never get enough of it. So, we thought: ‘there must be more people like us. Wouldn’t it be awesome to hook up with them?’ We did the usual, hit the socials, did the surfing, but there was no place where we could find all that we’d like in place. We would chat, we could find out where to go for the interesting gigs and events, we could read about it. But we had to go all these different places to get our fill. And we really wanted a haunt where we got get it all. We, therefore, decided to make it ourselves. Thank goodness we have the web design and development skills, so here we are…
With this website we want to enable the following in the one place:
Tuka Tuka is all about community. We have been around in this scene for a long time and know that in the end, it is all about the people. On this website you are sure to get in touch with like-minded people. Because it is all people and there more people the merrier, we have decided to host this website in a language that most people know. That’s why, although we are Dutch ourselves, this whole site is in English. The advantage of this is obvious: you get to know people from all over the planet who are interested in this subject. As a result, you get to share a wealth of knowledge and experience. To our opinion that is well worth it.
We want to create a space where information is gathered and shared around. As the community grows, so does our hoard of informative treasures. There are several ways to share the knowledge we all have. The obvious ones are by posting on the forums and by posting to blogs, where the formal is a more interactive, searching way of coming to conclusions and the latter aims to provide expert materials. Everyone can post on the forums, once they are registered. We will write more on how to become a blogger later on.
Although it’s great to virtually have people who share your interest around you daily, it’s also great to meet up in person. This website aims to enable live meetups as well. Through the Events section, you can learn where the gigs and workshops are in your neighbourhood. Via the forums you can make plans for your own meetups.
As this website grows and more people from all over join, the events on offer will steadily grow as well. Our ultimate aim is to make sure that you can find something you wherever you are in the world.
That’s what it’s all about in the end. Sharing the good and the bad, whether it’s on topic or off topic. We aim to provide a safe place where you can meet up with kindred spirits and be yourself. That’s why a lot of this website’s functionality is behind a login and can’t be accessed by everyone.
It was quite a challenge to create a website to include all this and still make it manageable and overseeable. We think we did a good job, but realistically a site like this is always a work in progress. As we open our doors, we will definitely come across obstacles. Any reports of bugs and/or malfunctions are welcome, as are suggestions on how to improve the website and its functionality.
There are five main pillars to this website, which can all be reached via both the topmenu as well as the different sections on the homepage. The pillars are:
On the homepage you will find the latest entries in all different pillars. As long as you are not logged in, these entries will be generic. As soon as you are logged in some will be custom tailored to your profile. The forum view on the homepage, for instance, will then change from showing the latest post to showing the latest posts in the threads you have subscribed to. Through time we will customise more and more or the pillars, so your homepage will become more and more tailored to your profile.
As said, on the homepage you will find the latest entries in all different pillars, but you also find a button which takes you to the all of the entries in the pillars. So, if you click on the button Go to forum in the forum section, you will go to the dedicated forums page, where you find all the forums entries. The same page can be reached by clicking FORUMS in the top menu.
Most of the content is self-evident in use. Below, we will discuss some issues that you might come across.
You can access some of the information on our website without having to log in. The most important and most fun information can only be accessed when you are logged in though. Before you can login, you have to register. You can do this by clicking the red SIGN UP button in the top right corner.
Once you’ve clicked this button you’ll be taken to the registration page, where you’ll be asked to fill in certain details. Some fields are obligatory, some aren’t. You can rest assured that we will not sell on your data to third parties. We don’t roll that way. So anything you fill in here is for our eyes only, to enable us to provide that safe place for all our users. The country field is important. This one enables us to show you relevant information on, for instance, the map on the Events page.
Should you have problems registering, not to worry. Help is just around the corner. Just send us a message through the contact form on the About Us page and we’ll come to the rescue as soon as possible. Please describe the problem as extensively as possible. So not just ‘I can’t register’, but rather ‘I can’t register. This, that and the other happens.’ If you get an error message, it always helps to include it. Just remember, we do sleep, eat and recreate sometimes as well, so it might be that you have to wait a wee bit before we answer. We do usually react within 24 hours.
Once you have filled everything in and hit the button, you will be thanked for registering and then redirected to the login page. However, you cannot login until you’ve verified your email address. You will receive an email at the address you’ve provided when registering which will contain a link. Click the link and you’ll be taken to the activation page. Your account is now active and you can now post in the forums. Are you a teacher, artist, organiser and/or do you have a wealth of relevant knowledge to share as a blogger? Read more below in the Becoming a contributor section to find how you get extra permissions.
Are you a teacher, artist, organiser and/or do you have a wealth of relevant knowledge to share as a blogger? Depending on which role suits you, you can get extra permissions to create a teacher, artist or organiser profile and/or create events. With blogger permissions you can post blogs that will appear in the Blogs section. Since we aim to be as complete as possible in representing the African music and dance community, we always welcome people who can help us with that.
So, how do you get these extra permissions? Pretty simple. You just go to the About us page and you fill in the appropriate form: Request additional permission. Tick the appropriate box(es) and tell us why we should give you these additional permissions. We will then process your request and let you know personally what happens next.
Once you’re logged in, all the regular user functionality of the site becomes available to you. You can now, for instance, post in the forums. You can also see all the member forums, whereas before some of the forums were closed for privacy reasons.
The forums are divided into main categories and those categories are divided into subcategories by means of subforums. If there are categories or subcategories missing in your opinion, please let us know. Within the subforums there are topic threads. These topics are started by the users themselves. When you create a topic, please make sure it is placed in the right subforum.
Important: the marketplace is for non-commercial use only. If you want to sell products or services commercially, please get in touch us to discuss the possibilities for advertising on our website. Also: do not post your events on the forum. That’s what our Events section is for. Please request additional permissions if you want to share your events as described above…
As we wrote before, we aim to create a large international community on this site so we can share our passion with even more people. The main language on this forum is therefore English and we ask you to largely stick to this. For safety purposes any languages that we cannot understand are not allowed, simply because it prevents us from moderating possibly inappropriate content. The languages that we understand are: English, Dutch and German. As the number of moderators increases the languages might as well. If so, the new languages will be added above.
But still, the aim is to be one large happy family. So please stick to English as much as possible and only use these other languages in those cases where you really don’t know the words. Never make fun of other people’s mistakes; correcting them isn’t necessary either. For a lot of us English isn’t our first language and we’re not here for language lessons. Language shaming might cause people to shut up all together, which may result in all of us losing out on valuable information.
Remember to always treat each other courteously. Badmouthing is not allowed anywhere on our site. Neither is playing on the man instead of the ball. We’re sure that even those of you who don’t the rules of football will know what we mean. It goes without saying that any form of discrimination is not done and will have consequences. You don’t always have to agree with each other, but everyone is entitled to their opinion, if stated in an acceptable manner.
You can upload videos up to 1000 MB directly via the Videos page our website. For safety purposes this functionality is available for pre-approved users. Do you have relevant videos that you’d to share to our channel so your fellow Africa aficionados can watch them as well? Go to the Videos page and click Upload a video. If you aren’t pre-approved you will notified here and see a button through which you can request approval right away.
As said, you can upload videos up to 100 MB directly. In case of videos that are larger, please send us an email so we can upload it for you.
As said earlier, should you have problems using our website, not to worry. Help is just around the corner. Just send us a message through the contact form on the About Us page and we’ll come to the rescue as soon as possible. Please describe the problem as extensively as possible. So not just ‘I can’t login’, but rather ‘I can’t login. This, that and the other happens.’ If you get an error message, it always helps to include it. Just remember, we do sleep, eat and recreate sometimes as well, so it might be that you have to wait a wee bit before we answer. We do usually react within 24 hours.
See the Contacting us section above
If you have a dispute, it is most likely on the forum. You can always ask a moderator to step in by sending them a private message. If that doesn’t solve the matter please contact us, as described in the Contacting us section. Describe the problem as clearly as possible so we can act quickly.
If you see a message that the site is offline for maintenance or updating, just hang in there. We should be back within 15 minutes. If the site is still not back after that amount of time, please try to refresh the site first, using F5. Still no luck? In this case, we’d appreciate it very much if you’d let us know as soon as possible. Check out the Contacting us section to find out how.
Over time, we will be sure to get some questions more than once. These will be integrated into this manual. Is your issue not there and you think it’s important? Please send us a message. Your input is very much apprecia