Frequently Asked Questions

Most of our members are individuals, which makes it easy for them to figure out who they're signing up as. However, if you're signing up for any kind of organization in which you're not the sole participant, it pays to plan ahead. In these cases, we allow what's called a "role membership."

The primary difference between a personal membership and a role membership is that the former refers to a person, and the latter refers to a job. This difference is made manifest through the membership's contact email address. For example, a personal membership might be "John Smith " whereas a role membership might be "Example Webmaster ."

In either case, we require that things still come down to one single person at any given time who has final authority over the membership, and who exercises that authority by controlling the role email address. (Reminder: email is trivially forged, so we assign responsibility based on who can receive email at a given address, not who can send email purporting to be from that address.)

We recommend that role membership email contact addresses be managed using forwarding. In the example above, you might configure webmaster@example.com to forward to john.smith@example.com. Then, if John Smith hands the responsibility over to Bill Jones, just change webmaster@example.com to forward to bill.jones@example.com instead. For archival/recovery purposes, it's often best if the forwarded messages are copied to the original address, so that Bill can go into the webmaster mailbox if need be and see what John did in the past.

These guidelines will help you create a sustainable membership for an organization that can cleanly transition from one webmaster to another. If you don't follow them and you get into trouble, we either won't be able to help you, or we'll have to charge for the time we have to spend investigating and unraveling the problem, and you'll likely have to provide extensive documentation justifying your access to the account. Neither option is appealing to anyone.

Please also keep in mind that you must be an authorized representative of an organization in order to create its role membership. Specifically, you cannot do this to create memberships for others or to bypass our requirement that memberships are non-transferable. In the case of a role membership transition, only the point of contact is changed, the membership itself remains held by the organization.