Making personal details such as email and postal addresses available on the internet needs to be done with care. At the same time, one of the aims of this website is to help put people in touch with recording schemes and county recorders. The way the website has been set up is described below. Editors, who might think to put personal details within a page, are asked to think carefully.
User Control
The intention is that every contact person who has their details made available through this website makes a conscious choice to do so. They can choose to make public a postal address, an electronic address or both. They can change or rescind this at any time.
User Accounts
Each contact person creates (or has created for them) an account on the website which allows them to log in to access the personal information that the site holds on them. An email address must always be provided so that forgotten passwords can be recovered but this address is never made public.
Emails
To enable the receipt of emails from users of the website the contact person must check a box to enable a personal contact form. The website user completes a form online which is forwarded to the contact person without the user seeing the email address. To prevent the form being used for spam by bots (computer programs) a captcha must be completed (retype the content of an image). If spam does become a problem this will have to be reappraised.
It may be prudent to set up an email account especially for mail from this site so that, if spam becomes a problem, it doesn't pollute a personal account.
Postal Address
If a contact person prefers to receive post rather than email then they can enter a postal address in their account details.
Contact Forms
If a person registered with the website agrees to be contacted by email then a personal contact form is created. The url of the contact form is /user/user_id/contact where user_id must be replaced by the unique number of the user. The current permissions of basic website editors does not make this information readily available but managers can find out by visiting the user administration page. The user id is the number contained within the url when a user account is edited.