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Content Guidelines for Web Accounts

The following content guidelines are designed to promote the free-flowing exchange of ideas about your interests, activities and hobbies, while maintaining standards consistent with the Internet community and the societies of the world. If you have any questions regarding these guidelines, please contact the CSU Webmaster.

Columbus State University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

Except as part of the university’s academic and/or teaching mission, CSU Personal Web Accounts cannot be used for the following activities:

• Displaying material containing pornographic material of any kind.
• Providing material that is grossly offensive, including blatant expressions of bigotry, prejudice, racism, hatred or excessive profanity.
• Displaying material that exploits children under 18 years of age.
• Promoting or providing instructional information about illegal activities, promoting physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promoting any act of cruelty to animals. This includes:
• Providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons.
• Disseminating personal information about another individual for malevolent purposes.
• Creating "Crush" sites.
• Providing computer software viruses or software designed to create a virus.
• Providing satellite TV cracks.
• Providing programs to "nuke" or create a denial of service attack against another individual.
• Facilitating the delivery of "spam" e-mail.
• Soliciting passwords from other members of the CSU community.
• Committing acts of copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other intellectual property infringement. This includes:
• Providing pirated computer programs or links to such programs.
• Providing information used to circumvent manufacturer-installed copy-protection devices, including serial or registration numbers for software programs.
• Providing any type of "cracker" utility.
• Providing pirated music or links to such files.
• Defaming any person or group.
• Developing restricted-access or “hidden” pages that require use of a password to view.
• Developing homepages or session posts that consist of hyperlinks to content not allowed by these guidelines.
• Using your homepage (or directory) as storage for remote loading.
• Having multiple accounts or Personal Homepages that are on the same CSU server.
• Gathering personal identifying information from individuals for commercial or unlawful purposes.
• Violating Internet standards for the purpose of promoting your home page.
• Engaging in commercial activities for personal gain, outside of the academic arena. Examples include:
• Offering for sale any products or services.
• Soliciting for advertisers or sponsors.
• Conducting raffles or contests that require any type of entry fee.
• Displaying a sponsorship banner of any kind, including those that are generated by banner or link exchange services.
• Displaying banners for services that provide cash or cash-equivalent prizes to users in exchange for hyperlinks to their Web sites.
• Promoting, soliciting or participating in multilevel marketing or pyramid schemes.
• Mounting unprotected discussion board, forum or guestbooks. All pages that allow submissions must include anti-spam protections such as CAPTCHA, logic tests, and/or spam filtering.

Web page owners are responsible for ensuring that all content, whether posted by themselves or others, meets CSU Web content guidelines.

In addition to the above, all personal Web sites must contain a disclaimer statement similar to the following:

CSU does not actively monitor the content of Personal Homepages, but we will investigate complaints. Please submit any such complaints to the CSU Webmaster.

Members who are in violation of CSU Personal Homepage Web Account Guidelines may have their account revoked, services cancelled and their pages, or portions of their pages, suspended or removed without warning, in which event, CSU will not return the removed pages or Web site to the offending member.

New Personal Webpage accounts may be requested at any time during the Fall through Summer semester. For students, accounts in good standing will remain active during the academic year requested. Faculty and staff accounts in good standing will remain active until employment termination, unless sufficient inactivity suggests otherwise.

All student accounts will be deleted and all student personal Web sites will be removed from the system at the end of the Summer session, just prior to the beginning of the Fall session. As such, students who have had an account during the previous academic year must request a new account during the current academic year. Faculty and staff accounts and Web sites will be removed upon termination of employment. All faculty, staff and students are responsible for saving their Web sites prior to their removal.

CSU is not responsible or liable for any loss of data resulting from our deletion of Personal Homepages or folders, network or system outages, file corruption or any other reasons. We urge all users to maintain backup versions of their Web sites to guard against losses of any kind.