How community voting works

You can love recipes and vote for menus without an account. That keeps it easy and private, but it also means our votes are community feedback, not a verified one-person-one-vote poll. Please read the rankings in that spirit.

What a vote is

  • Only recipes and menus approved by a moderator can receive votes.
  • Each browser can vote once per recipe or menu, and can take the vote back.
  • Your browser keeps an anonymous, signed voting ID in a cookie. It doesn’t identify you, and it can’t be guessed or forged.

Keeping it fair

  • The first time a browser votes (and every 30 days after), we may ask for a quick Cloudflare Turnstile check that you’re human.
  • Votes are rate-limited per browser and per network.
  • Unusual patterns, such as many new browsers on one network voting for the same entry, are held back from the totals until a moderator reviews them.

Reading the numbers

Loves (or votes) are counted votes, one per browser per entry. Someone using two devices could vote twice.

Estimated unique voters counts browsers that passed the human check, once per internet connection. Because voting is anonymous, nobody’s identity is verified. It’s a deliberately cautious estimate of how many different people voted. It can undercount families or offices that share an internet connection.

Rankings only appear once approved entries exist, and an entry needs at least one counted vote to be ranked. Ties share a place.

Privacy

  • No accounts, no email required. An email address on a recipe is optional. Only moderators can see it, and it is never published.
  • Menus: anyone with your public link can view your menu. Only someone with your private edit link can change or delete it. We store that link’s secret only in hashed form, so we can’t recover it for you.
  • Recipes: nothing is published until a moderator approves it. Your private submission link lets you check its status, make changes or withdraw it, which permanently deletes it and its photo.
  • Your city (optional): we only ask for a city or town name, never an address, and we never collect your location. It appears with your menu or recipe and, once approved, in the community list on the map page (the map itself shows where South Africans live, not individual contributions). Each contributor is counted once.
  • Photos: we strip location (GPS), camera details and other hidden metadata before storing a photo. Unapproved photos are never publicly accessible.
  • Network data: we never store IP addresses. We keep a one-way keyed fingerprint of your network for abuse prevention, and remove it after 90 days.
  • On your device: your menu drafts and private links are saved in your browser’s local storage. Clearing your browser data removes them.