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Yale University Web institutional server policies
Web publishing services are provided for Yale academic, instructional, and professional purposes. Use of these services are encouraged for Yale academic and professional purposes; personal web publishing should be conducted on any of a widely available set of commercial personal blog or web spaces.
All use of Yale’s web spaces are governed by the Yale IT Appropriate Use Policy and other applicable University policies. You must review the IT Appropriate Use Policy and this service policy, before creating a blog or personal web page.
Questions concerning your account, these guidelines, or University web policy in general, feel free to email the Yale University webmaster at webmaster@yale.edu.
The following are ITS policies specific to the institutional web servers:
Yale University institutional web policies
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All Yale’s web publishing services are provided for academic, research, instructional, and Yale professional purposes. Yale reserves the right to remove any material that does not adhere to this policy.
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ITS staff respect account authors' privacy and do not inspect the content of account files except in the course of a policy violation investigation. However, as part of normal maintenance it is occasionally necessary for staff to move directories to different disk partitions and to review directory and file permissions.
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ITS reserves the right to close accounts for persistent problems of inappropriate use, inaccurate or untimely information, privacy, security or performance reasons, violations of University policy, or illegal activities including posting copyrighted materials.
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Yale University web authors must comply with all HIPAA security and privacy regulations for Protected Health Information (PHI). No PHI may be posted on any Yale University institutional web server. ITS reserves the right to immediately remove materials that have been identified as potential PHI violations, or any materials containing data defined by Yale as confidential or restricted such as SSN or credit card numbers and to immediately terminate accounts in violation of these Yale University policies.
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Websites are managed by individual authors; any material served without password or other restriction is publicly available.
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Because web servers are shared spaces, this inevitably leads to some loss of privacy. For example, other authorized Yale clients can easily find out your name, your email address, as well as the names and content of files you post in this public space.
Typical URL forms on institutional web server accounts
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Typical Yale URLs are extensions of the “root” URL of the web server that hosts your site. In general, only URLs ending in “yale.edu” are hosted on Yale University web servers. Some organizations using “custom” URLs use the “.org” form for their URLs. In very rare cases Yale has agreed to host the DNS pointer for a “.com” URL form (to prevent URL squatters from buying the “.com” form of a Yale URL), but in no cases will Yale University host a “.com” website on an Yale institutional web server.
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Central Campus accounts on www.yale.edu (“Elsinore”): Example: www.yale.edu/account_name/
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Medical Campus accounts on info.med.yale.edu: Example: info.med.yale.edu/account_name
- Drupal web accounts: Example: english.yale.edu
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Requests for particular forms of URL are made on a “first-come, first served” basis, and certain URLs forms may not be available to you because they are already in use. The Yale University webmaster also reserves the right to refuse requests for URL forms likely to be used in the future by Yale University departments and administrators
Digital media or other types of large files and the institutional web servers
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Yale University’s institutional web servers are designed to serve web pages, and are not to be used as media servers for large media files or as download areas for large files of any type. This is to insure the proper functioning of all Yale University websites and to protect Yale’s institutional web servers from the extraordinary traffic volumes and storage requirements that digital media files sometimes impose. ITS reserves the right to immediately remove materials that exceed normal network traffic rules.
Media servers at Yale
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ITS offers professional-quality, high-bandwidth media server space to the Yale community on a fee-for-service basis through the Yale Broadcast and Media Center.
Please contact the Yale Broadcast and Media Center directly for additional information on the policies and availability of server space to meet your digital media needs.
Abandoned or unmaintained websites
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The ITS reserves the right to archive and remove sites on institutional web servers that have not been edited or updated in four or more years. We reserve the right to archive and remove websites where the official contact person for the site cannot be contacted or has left the University. ITS will make reasonable efforts to contact the site owners in such cases, however these apparently abandoned websites may be removed without notice after four years of inactivity.
Policy changes and policy enforcement
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Yale University Web institutional server policies may change without notice, however, we will always try to give Yale web publishers notice well in advance of any major changes in web polices or procedures.
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ITS also reserves the right to make any technical changes on Yale’s institutional web servers, as necessary.
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ITS reserves the right to take immediate action to deactivate accounts, websites, or particular types of files or scripting that may endanger the normal operation or security of Yale’s institutional web servers.
blogs.yale.edu & other Yale servers
blogs.yale.edu
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The ITS blog is provided for academic, instructional and professional purposes at Yale.
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blogs.yale.edu is not spidered by search engines such as Google, which means that a search in the major search engines will not find your blog. The site search engine at blogs.yale.edu provides local search.
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By default, the URL of your blog will include your NetID. When you choose your blog title, if you do not want to include your name or NetID you do not have to. If you do not want people to contact you directly, it's probably best not to publish your name, NetID or email address.
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The comments feature: You can decide whether or not to allow people to post comments on your blog by enabling this feature in the account options after you have set up your blog. By default, only people with Yale NetIDs are allowed to post comments. When you comment on some one's blog, your NetID, but not your name, will appear. Comment responsibly. Support for this service If you have any questions regarding how this application works, please consult the online documentation. Comments on all areas and the function of this application are appreciated. We may not be able to respond to every need and/or request, but we will read them and try to incorporate them as possible.
Other Yale servers
Please contact the following service providers directly for additional information on the policies and availability of server space to meet your needs.
Related links
