Website Editorial Policies

The following is provided as a statement of the Web Site editor's current practices. Your comments and suggestions are of course encouraged.

General Editorial Objectives

The Debatable Lands website has three primary objectives, in approximate descending order of priority:

Anything outside of those categories will be less of a priority, and may get passed over altogether to avoid diluting the site's effectiveness at these three goals.

Along those lines, and in answer to a frequently-asked question, the Debatable Lands website will not make an effort to provide an omnibus portal to the many medieval resources that are online; there are other sites with the dedicated maintainance resources to do a far better job.

Similarly, the Debatable Lands website does not accept commercial advertising.

Website Updates

Update requests are to be submitted to the webminister either by e-mail or by handwritten letter. No content will be updated without express request except in the case of grammatical, spelling, or key error. Updates will be processed as soon as practical after receipt. However, this may take up to a week in some cases. All emergency requests must also be followed up with a message to the BMDL mailing list by the requestor.

Event Announcement Editorial Policy

I encourage event organizers to provide online event information for me to link to the event listing. If event organizers e-mail me the text of an announcement, I will be glad to format and host it at this server. I am equally willing to link to event announcements at other sites, if preferred.

I also am happy to assist event organizers who wish to put information on line beyond the newsletter announcement, such as competition rules, class schedules, menus, etc. I particularly encourage and am willing to assist with using the web site to broadcast information such as remaining reservation counts that can not be kept effectively up to date by newsletter.

Event announcements will be kept online until the month following the event to allow people to find contact information for lost-and-found, etc.

Design Considerations

The emphasis of the website will be on providing rich content and accessibility, with formatting chosen to accent the content as unobtrusively as possible. All pages may be tested against commonly-available releases of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Lynx, and must not fail catastrophically in any of those environments.

This is for four reasons:

Per SCA Inc. policy, this site is designed with attention to the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

E-mail, Privacy, Intellectual Property Rights

The Debatable Lands website editor collects various aggregate site traffic statistics for the website, which are used to gauge which parts of the site are getting paticular attention. These measures do not include individually-identifying information. The Debatable Lands website editor does not collect personal information of any sort on the site's individual users.

The info@debatablelands.org mailing address is forwarded to the Baronial Chatelaine, who will forward messages on to the appropriate contact. Current practice is that the website editor responds to site-specific concerns and the seneschale responds to people seeking information on the local group. Mail received may be stored by the appropriate officer per policies regarding correspondence, but we do not use it to create mailing lists nor will it be distributed to a third party for such purposes.

Per stated policy of the SCA Inc.: No modern personal information will be published on this site except with the written permission, minimally by e-mail, of the person(s) identified. It is my practice to keep personally identifiable information on this website to a minimum. However, I will list modern name, e-mail, phone, even home address for officers or event contacts at their request, but caution you to consider the wide audience and the common practice of "mining" web pages for junk e-mail lists in deciding what you would like me to publish.