Linking to pages and resources on this site is encouraged, but the links MUST be placed on a publically-accessible page. Placing links behind any form of login or access restriction is strictly forbidden.

Use of resources on this site

I put stuff on this website for the benefit of any and all who care to read it. I am not one of these people who are up their own arse about other people copying or linking to stuff that they have made accessible over the Internet. If that bothered me I wouldn't have made the stuff available in the first place. I'm quite the reverse. If I've done something you like, go ahead and download it. If you want to put a link to it on some other site, go ahead and link.

However, the links, and any copied stuff on websites, MUST be publically accessible just as the original material is. Nothing relating to this website, whether it is a link or copied material, may be placed on a web page which is behind any form of login or access restriction.

The following list of things which count as access restrictions is not exhaustive:
- Requirement to supply a username and password
- Requirement to supply a username or other identifier (eg. email address) even if no password is required
- Requirement to allow cookies
- Requirement to enable javascript
- Requirement to enable flash or any other plugin
- Requirement to supply a particular Referer: or User-Agent: string
- Dependence on any browser-specific feature

The following is an empirical test for compliance: The page must be accessible purely by issuing a GET request from a telnet client. Say the web page http://arfle.barfle.com/gloop.html - ie. a file named gloop.html on the server arfle.barfle.com - contains a link to a page on, or material copied from, pigeonsnest.co.uk (or the previous domain name, pigeon.dyndns.org, which is deprecated, but remains valid to avoid breaking links). It must be possible, from any random machine connected to the Internet on which a telnet client is installed, to type the following:

telnet arfle.barfle.com 80
GET /gloop.html

and receive in response the page gloop.html in its entirety, including the link to, or material from, pigeonsnest.co.uk or pigeon.dyndns.org. If there is any other response, the test is considered to have failed. Furthermore, the page delivered MUST be either standard HTML, as defined by its passing validation by The W3C Markup Validation Service, or plain human-readable ASCII text. If the page does not pass validation, or if it requires javascript or flash or any other add-on to be enabled in order to view the link or material from my site, the test is considered to have failed.

If the test is failed, it indicates that the page is non-compliant. If the test is passed, it does not guarantee that the page is compliant, as there are doubtless plenty of weaselly ways to sneak an access restriction past the test that I can't be arsed to sit down and think of. So the only 100% reliable test of whether or not the page is compliant is whether or not I say it is.

If the page is not compliant, either the page/server concerned MUST be reconfigured so that the page is compliant, or the link or copied material MUST be moved to another page which is compliant.

The following breaches are currently outstanding and must be rectified ASAP by the webmasters of the sites in question. The MZ Riders Club Cornwall are being particularly cheeky by linking to this very page from a page which is not freely accessible. The site beardyweirdy.co.uk are displaying a similar cheek.

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