policies—quality assurance, accuracy, and Access to information

ETAF and DCI observe the following policies and practices regarding visitor submissions. All these policies and practices apply to each and every item submitted for publication by a visitor unless otherwise stated for that specific item.

information accuracy

Visitors who submit works or other information for publication at this web site are solely responsible for the accuracy, correctness, and detail of the information they submit.

quality assurance—submitters please take note

ETAF Staff review and check all works and information that visitors submit for publication at this web site. They accept a work for publication only if, in their opinion, it is of sufficient quality to merit visitor attention. Works or information with serious problems are rejected.

When they apply these standards to creative works, Staff take seriously the need to protect artistic freedom. To maintain the artistic integrity of visitor submissions, poetry or other aesthetic works, which have the inherent right and need to be preserved unaltered, are granted considerable artistic license. Among these types of works are original creative writing such as novels, painting, music, and photographic images.

quality & content

Whether or not they are creative art, all submitted works or information must pass Electricka's quality assurance standards before they will be published.

When evaluating submitted work or information for possible publication, ETAF Staff are primarily concerned with these factors:

• Decency, where decency includes such factors and smut, moral turpitude, bad taste, obscene or distasteful or inappropriate remarks, etc.
• Views, opinions, issues, descriptions, allusions, suggestions, or statements of any kind about religion, morality, philosophy, politics, science, business, or any other fields or subjects that are improper because they are distasteful, incorrect, deliberately distorted, partial, controversial, or unethical.
• Statements, assertions, or remarks of any kind that are aggressively or unreasonably controversial, excessively narrow in viewpoint, hateful, misleading, false, one-sided, distorted, biased, distasteful, inaccurate, perverted, inaccurate, incorrect, deliberately distorted, partial, unethical, controversial, unethical, or unfair, especially those that might offend, insult, or challenge religious, political, philosophical, ethical, or moral beliefs or belief systems or offend personal physical appearance.
• Unfounded personal attacks, slander, abuse, defamation, or vituperation; attempts to libel, damagingly misrepresent, or assassinate the characters of people or agencies.
• Objectionable attempts to proselytize, convert, recruit, solicit, enroll, enlist, intimidate, frighten, or psychologically pervert individuals or groups.
• Attempts to defraud, swindle, misrepresent, deny, or cheat persons or agencies of their rightful financial assets or other resources—especially for asocial, antisocial, immoral, illegal, political, or religious purposes.
• Unapproved advertising, fund gathering, donation, or financial solicitation by persons or agents, or agencies not unaffiliated with or approved by ETAF, DCI, or their agents.
• Artistic relevance; technical and aesthetic quality.
• Format and appearance.
• Information content, correctness, and accuracy.
• Quality and quantity of presentation materials.
• Plagiarism.
• Whether submitters possess the legal right to publish a work, its content, its media, or the information it contains.
• Serious and important factual errors.
• Privacy, safety, and security of people and agencies.
• Privacy, safety, and security of visitors who submit items for publication, other visitors, and third parties.
• Relevance to the arts; focus on the arts.
• Appropriateness of web sites that are linked to or cited; appropriateness of agencies or persons cited. Do they meet Electricka's other standards for quality and ethical conduct?

acceptance and rejection policies

Electricka reserves and exercises the right to reject visitor submissions for any reason without notice or explanation.

By the act of submitting information of any kind for publication, Electricka's visitors agree to accept and abide by her decisions on whether or not to publish their submitted materials.

Visitors whose submissions are not published are free to send inquires about rejections, to which Electricka may or may not respond at her discretion.

Electricka does not return submitted materials.

changes to visitor submissions

Electricka's Staff rarely makes changes to a visitor submission to make it suitable for publication. In the vast majority of cases, if a submission isn't suitable for publication upon arrival, Staff will not modify it to make it suitable. This is especially the case if the submitted information or work is a ByLine feature or any other kind of artistic or creative work or information.

However, to render an otherwise unpublishable submission suitable for publication, in a few instances Staff may elect to make one, two, or at most a very few minor changes if, in Staff's opinion, these changes will render the submission publishable. In this connection, a submission's publication suitability depends on such factors as its its readability, clarity, accuracy regarding minor details, ambiguity, grammatical correctness, sentence construction, word definition, and errors in style.

Staff only makes changes that clarify ambiguous or unclear statements or correct minor factual mistakes, typographical errors, and glaring grammatical blunders. Corrections are limited to minor rewording of one or at most two or three sentences, and they are restricted to simple sentence rewording.

If and when Staff makes such a change before publishing, great care is taken not to alter the style, content, layout, graphical appearance, persuasiveness, ideas, artistic qualities, line of argument, meaning, tone, sense, or other such properties of submitted materials.

If you are a submitter and Staff have made a minor change to your submission of the kind described here dissatisfies you, Electricka offers you the opportunity to request revision, a withdrawal, or a retraction.

—policy— request a correction, revision, withdrawal, retraction, or apology If you are a dissatisfied submitter because Electricka's Staff have made a change to your submission of the kind described here, Electricka offers you the opportunity to request a correction, revision, withdrawal, retraction, or apology. See the page titled Policies—Rejections; Corrections, revisions, and withdrawals; retractions and apologies; returns and Lost materials: click here.

Processing procedures for visitor form submissions

Form submission procedures:

• Visitors submit a work or information for publication by filling out a form and pressing the SUBMIT button on the form.
• At the time a form is submitted, Electricka's web site generates an automatic email message confirming that you filled out your form correctly and that it has been accepted. If not valid, you will be asked to correct your entries and resubmit.
• Normally, depending on the nature of the submission, within a few minutes or less you will receive an automatically-generated return email message from Electricka's web site confirming that Electricka's staff has received the information you provided in your form and that it plans to review its contents.
• The submitter has the option to reply to this automatic email message.
• Allow up to a few days or more for Electricka's Staff to process your  form submission. After that Electricka or Staff may contact you via email with questions or comments.

Normally, no additional communication regarding your submission will take place. Please do not ask ETAF Staff to notify you of the status of your submission, of whether it has been rejected, or of whether Staff plans to publish your submission. If your submission is published, Staff will not inform you of where to find it at Electricka's web site.

—note— submission processing practices Normally, Electricka's Staff: Does not return submissions. Please don't submit materials you're not willing to lose. Is not responsible for content omissions or errors they may make. Is not responsible for submissions that are lost in transit between you and this web site. Exceptions to the above processing practices are handled on a case-by-case basis.

About permissions; about restriction and protection of published materials

Some computer programs give certain individuals the ability to grant or deny to third parties the right to download, modify, view, open, save, print, copy, publish, distribute, or otherwise modify or manipulate the content of automated documents, computer files, or other automated materials.

Visitors who submit materials for publication at Electricka's web site are free to use such programs and to assign such restrictions to protect their submissions from alteration or infringement.

Electricka never assigns such restrictions to materials submitted by visitors who submit materials for publication at Electricka's web site. If such restrictions are assigned by a visitor to Electricka's who submits material for publication, the visitor has chosen to apply these restrictions, not Electricka. The automated materials themselves that are downloaded or displayed prevent other visitors from performing any of these types of disallowed functions, not any function or operation that is part of Electricka's web site.

ETAF and DCI never grant, add, modify, deny, or remove these types of functions incorporated by visitors in the materials they submit for publication. They never change a visitor's ability to open, alter, print, copy, publish, distribute, or otherwise modify or manipulate materials submitted by other visitors.

Visitors who open or download files—please take note

Visitors who submit materials for publication at Electricka's web site are solely responsible for granting or denying permissions to the items they submit for other visitors to use. With the possible exception of unforeseen technical glitches, visitors to this web site are able to open, print, copy, publish, distribute, alter or otherwise modify published materials unless the visitors who submit these materials for publication have specified otherwise.

If you are having problems with the files or pages you download or view in your browser, the cause of your difficulties may be a so-called permission assigned by the visitor to Electricka's web site who submitted the file or page for publication.

Despite the fact that a permission is normally an authorization to do something, in computereze sometimes a permission is the denial of the right to do something.

A visitor who submitted a file or page for you to see in your browser may have chosen to add one or more "permissions" that will prevent you from doing other things with it. For example, a visitor may have chosen to deny you the right to copy or print the file or page.

On the other hand, a visitor may choose to add one permission but not to add others. For example, you may have the right to print a page or file but not to copy it. In such cases, permissions may be prominently posted on the file or page you download, or you may have to use trial and error to discover what you are allowed to do.

—tip— Can't open, print, copy, publish, Distribute, or otherwise modify or manipulate a Document, file, or other automated materials? If you can't open, print, copy, publish, distribute, or otherwise modify or manipulate automated documents, computer files, or other automated materials that you open or download at web site, barring web malfunctions the restrictions you encounter have been mandated by the individual who submitted the materials for publication.

Visitors who submit files for publication—please take note

Visitors who submit materials for publication at Electricka's web site who desire to limit and protect their publication rights are advised to employ traditional means for protecting the content or use of materials they submit for publication, such as copyright, trademark, or service mark notices.

Visitors seeking protection from undesired or unauthorized access to files they submit for publication at Electricka's web site are also free to employ automated means to grant or deny permissions in the automated documents, computer files, or other automated materials they submit. They are are solely responsible for granting or denying permissions for the items they submit.

ETAF and DCI never grant, add, modify, deny, or remove permissions given to materials submitted by visitors for publication. They never change a visitor's ability to open, print, copy, publish, distribute, or otherwise modify or manipulate materials submitted by other visitors.

For more information about how to employ automated means to limit or protect publication rights, see the information above on this page.

More at this web site about visitor submissions

See these additional ETAF and DCI policies pertaining to publication rights and obligations:

• Access To Published Information

• Copyright

• Proprietary Rights

• Rejections, Corrections, Retractions, Returns, And Lost Materials