Policy

Introduction

The website is a public view of St. John’s. Although St. John’s is in favour of freedom of speech and expression, the website isn’t always an appropriate place for the exercise of such freedoms. The following policies will therefore be enforced.

Enforcement and Arbitration

The site administrators are expected to ensure compliance with website policy, and may alter or delete any site content and may restrict or remove user access as they see fit. If you wish to complain about any content or any action by site participants, content providers or administrators:

1. In the first instance please discuss the issue with the person concerned.
2. If you are unable to resolve the issue, the issue should be raised with the publicity and promotions team.
3. If you are still not satisfied with the resolution, arbitration may be obtained through the church meeting.

Casual users and authenticated users may not be aware of this policy. The expected medium for complaints from such users is the “Contact us” page. If such a complaint is received:

1. The complainant should be informed of this policy and that if they wish to follow the complaint up that should also be done through the “Contact us” page.
2. The complaint should be passed to the person concerned (or to the site administrators, if the person cannot be identified or contacted) for resolution.
3. The complainant should not be given the personal contact details of the person concerned.

Content

[This material is derived in part from the default terms for the YABB bulletin board system and is used in compliance with the license at that site]

The website shall not contain any material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually-oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise in violation of any law. It shall not contain any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by the content provider or we have consent from the owner of the copyrighted material. Spam, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are also inappropriate to this site.

Note that it is impossible for us to confirm the validity of posts on this forum. We do not actively monitor the posted messages and are not responsible for their content. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented. The messages express the views of the author, not necessarily the views of this forum. Removal of objectionable content is a manual process, however, so please be aware that we may not be able to remove or edit particular messages immediately.

Child Protection

All content must comply with the church child protection policy, a copy of which is available in the Link Vestibule.

Personal Information

In general, family names, telephone numbers, addresses, email addresses or photographs of individuals should not appear on the website. In some cases that is not realistically possible or desirable; for example we give the full names of our ministers and are likely to want to give the full name of visiting speakers. In all such cases, the written consent of the person concerned must be obtained in advance. The Publicity and Promotions team has a list of church members and friends who have already given such consent and the extent of those consents.

Guidelines

We aim for the website to have a professional appearance but be generally informal.

Please take care to use standard British English spelling, syntax and grammar unless another language variety is clearly being used for a specific purpose.

Generally, a single web page should more-or-less fit on an average computer screen, and should have more whitespace than printed material would. If your web page has too much on it to fit on a screen, consider splitting it into multiple linked pages or putting the content into a PDF document for the reader to download.

TEXT IN ALL CAPITALS IS PERCEIVED ON THE INTERNET AS SHOUTING. Please don’t shout.

Try not to deviate much from the standard fonts and styles used on the existing pages of the website. Keeping to those fonts and styles will help the website to look like a coherent whole rather than an assortment of unrelated pages.

When you create content for the website, look at the preview to see whether it looks good. If it doesn’t, keep editing until it does.