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- Does the Viking Council provide web
hosting for Packs or Troops?
We often receive inquiries about whether
the Viking Council provides web hosting for units. The
Council does not provide any web hosting. National BSA does not permit
Councils to do this.
What some Councils have been doing is to arrange with
their ISP to provide a discounted service and a "virtual" domain name that
is similar to the Council name.
Fictitious example:
http://cubpack123.vikingbsa.org
These arrangements are completely independent as
far as account responsibility and access to the actual Council site.
Viking Council could make a similar arrangement with an ISP anywhere on
the net. One of the reasons that we are not considering this,
at the present, is that we have no control over what the Unit puts on
their web site and we do not wish to have people make an erroneous
assumption that the Unit pages represent the Council.
- Do other Councils provide free
web hosting for Packs or Troops?
There are come Councils that have made business
arrangements to help provide "low cost" hosting to units in their
Councils. Indianhead Council in St. Paul has such an arrangement
with their ISP and the unit can pay $10/month to have their site hosted.
Our current ISP,
US Internet, would also offer you a similar independent arrangement,
although the domain name would not be related to the Council.
- Can you recommend any other
arrangements for "free" web hosting for our Pack or Troop?
There are a lot of sites that offer free hosting.
We generally make Units aware of
OrgSites or
Scouter Magazine
for free hosting. Scouter Magazine provide this service exclusively for
Scout Units and have been doing it since 1995. The disadvantage is
that there are advertisements with most any "free" site.
OrgSites has a very friendly site with enhanced email and calendar
features - with no advertising. Most
Units do not want to pay anything for service, so you will find very
few units, at the present time, that are hosted under their own domain
name. We do not endorse or recommend any source for web
hosting - this is simply information for the Unit to consider.
- Will the Viking Council ever offer
assistance
with web hosting?
Viking Council may look at the "virtual hosting"
arrangement again in the future, but for now are not planning on doing
anything in the near term. This is strictly for policy
reasons, not technical. Like anything else, this could
change for the right opportunity or reasons.
link to our Pack or Troop web
site?
The VikingBSA web site has a
special page that contains links to any
Unit web site that we are aware of and
that meets our standards. The Unit sites must be dedicated to
Scouting and should not contain any personal information about its
members. No photographs of youth may be posted if there is any
name or personal information associated with it. In all cases,
permission should be sought before using any photos of people. We
post a disclaimer to warn anyone that visits a Unit site that the content
and materials that they may see are solely the responsibility of the Unit.
The Viking Council is not responsible for any of the information or
materials on a Unit Site and the Viking Council has absolutely no control
over what the Unit chooses to do with their pages. We will remove
links to any Unit site that violates the confidentiality of its members or
contains any information that is considered "commercial" or otherwise not
in keeping with Scouting.
Top of Page
The
ScoutingBSA.org web site is a
legacy site of the Viking Council BSA, now Northern Star Council.
This site was the original council site and was active from 1996 to
2002 and run by volunteers. As the web became more important to
Scouting, the council took over with paid staff. This site is no
longer maintained but is an interesting snapshot of an early Scouting
web site. You can share your comments using our
on-line form or
send a message to the
Webmaster. Thank you
for visiting! |
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