Community Guidelines

Purpose and scope

Persia Gateway exists to share practical, cultural, and community information for Iranians in the St. Louis area. These guidelines apply to everything the community sends us for publication — submissions, recommendations, corrections, events, and contact messages meant to be published — and to future community spaces on this site.

Taking part is always welcome, but it doesn't guarantee publication: everything is reviewed before it appears.

Respectful participation

Treat people with dignity. Disagreement is fine — it happens in every healthy community — but it must stay civil and on topic.

Degrading language and attacks on people have no place here, including attacks based on nationality, ethnicity, language, immigration status, religion or nonreligion, gender, sexuality, age, disability, or any other personal characteristic.

Political and religious boundary

Persia Gateway is not a platform for political or religious campaigning, advocacy, recruitment, fundraising, persuasion, or sectarian disputes.

Cultural observances and neutral, factual information are welcome when they directly relate to a practical resource or a reviewed public event. This boundary is about content and conduct on this site — never about who you are or what you privately believe.

Privacy and consent

Don't publish other people's private information. That includes private messages and private-group content, home addresses, personal phone numbers or email addresses, immigration details, financial or medical information, and identifiable photos shared without clear permission.

Don't identify someone as a client, patient, student, volunteer, group member, or event attendee without their consent. If you submit your own contact details, make sure you understand which of them may become public. When reporting a concern, avoid repeating sensitive material more than necessary.

To understand which public pages are useful, we use Vercel Web Analytics. It uses no cookies. The service derives a temporary daily hash to count visitors and reports anonymized, aggregate data about the page visited, referrer, general location, device type, browser, and operating system. Before analytics data is sent, Persia Gateway removes every URL query parameter and does not send form entries, contact messages, directory searches, or application-supplied identifiers.

Persia Gateway also keeps daily aggregate counts of three public interactions: when someone starts filling out the listing-submission form, when a Community event source link is opened, and when an Around St. Louis event source link is opened. Each recording contains only the interaction type, page language (English or Persian), and a count of one; the database supplies the date and increments the daily total. We do not send form field names or values, event titles, event or source URLs, record or user identifiers, or precise timestamps. The result is a daily total by interaction type and language, not a history of individual behavior.

Harassment and safety

Threats, intimidation, stalking, doxxing, slurs, sexual harassment, repeated unwanted contact, and encouraging harm are never acceptable — and neither is retaliating against someone for reporting a concern or asking for a correction.

Persia Gateway is not an emergency service. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency service first.

Honest participation

Be open about your connections. If you have a personal, professional, financial, ownership, referral, or organizational tie to something you submit or recommend, say so.

Spam, disguised advertising, fabricated recommendations, undisclosed paid promotion, bait-and-switch offers, unsolicited recruiting, pyramid or multilevel-marketing promotion, and pressure tactics don't belong here. Legitimate listings, events, volunteer opportunities, and organization resources are welcome — through the appropriate submission and review path.

Reporting and corrections

If something on Persia Gateway concerns you or needs correcting, tell us through the Contact page. Where it's safe to do so, include the page or item, what the concern is, and any context that helps us understand it.

We review every report and correction request. We can’t promise an immediate response, anonymity, or a particular outcome, but we consider what we receive and take action when appropriate. Please don’t repost harmful or private material just to document a report.

Board rules and moderation

Future boards and submission forms may show additional rules of their own — about allowed content, public contact details, safety, compensation, expiry dates, or how they're moderated. Those rules add to these guidelines; when they differ, the stricter privacy or safety boundary applies.

To keep the site useful and safe, Persia Gateway may decline, edit, unpublish, archive, or remove material that violates these guidelines, creates a safety or privacy risk, is misleading, or simply doesn't fit the surface it was submitted to. Questions and correction requests are always welcome through Contact.