Here follow some of the policies regarding the CCSO Nameserver and
the data contained therein:

NAMESERVER UPDATES
Updates for people are done four times per year.  An update can
include one or all of the following steps:

  1. New staff and students are added to the database.

  2. Fields that originate from official data are set to official
     values.  These fields are:
          name, phone, office_phone, home_phone, address,
          office_address, home_address, permanent_address,
          department, title, curriculum, high_school
     All other fields are left strictly alone.

  3. Staff and students that have left the University are removed
     after a one year "grace period".

The step listed in #2 above may be avoided.  If you do not wish this
update to occur on your entry, put something in your "no_update" field.
If you have something in your "no_update" field, your entry will not be
touched by step #2, except for the "name" and "curriculum" fields, which
are ALWAYS updated. For more information, see help on "no_update".

The approximate schedule for student/faculty/staff updates is as follows:
     January    Step 1 and Step 2, students only
     June       Step 1 and Step 2, students only
     September  Step 1 and Step 2, students only
     October    Steps 1, 2, and 3 for students, faculty, and staff

The University Timetable information is updated three times a year.
The fall timetable is available in early March, the spring timetable
comes online in early October, and the summer timetable is available in
the middle of February.

The ph restaurant guide has not been updated since summer 1991.  Two
volunteers have come forward to update it.

Telephone area code information in ph comes from an old, pre-existing
dataset and is only sporadically and haphazardly updated.

Weather information is updated in real-time as it arrives on the data feed.

MAILING LISTS
The Nameserver is not to be used as to generate mailing lists.  For this
reason, queries resulting in more than 25 persons are rejected.  This
is not negotiable.

Sites from which users attempt to circumvent this restriction may be
placed on the "reject list".  The Nameserver will not accept queries
from such sites.

PROXY RIGHTS FOR NETWORK ADMINISTRATORS
To facilitate the process of keeping ph entries up to date, CCSO now
offers proxy rights to network administrators, so they can systematically
enter e-mail address information for their users into the Nameserver
database and make other modifications upon request.

Network administrators who wish to obtain proxy rights for a group of
users should send an e-mail request to "nameserv@uiuc.edu". The request
should contain the administrator's own name and ph alias and a list of
ph aliases for the entries to which s/he wants to gain proxy.  Once
proxy rights to a ph entry are granted, the administrator can edit any
changeable field in the entry.

Note: It is incumbent upon the administrator to get permission from his
or her end-users before requesting proxy rights from CCSO.  Users who
don't want their network admins to be able to change their information
should put "no!" in their own "proxy" fields.  To do so, login to ph
(see help on "login") and type:

  make proxy=no!

Network administrators who would prefer not to bear the burden of
managing multiple ph entries, but nevertheless want to have their users'
"email" fields filled in or updated, can send a list of ph aliases and
associated e-mail addresses to "nameserv@uiuc.edu".  The e-mail addresses
in such a list should be in the format "user@fully.qualified.domain.name"
(for example, "paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu"), rather than an alias-based
address such as "p-pomes@uiuc.edu".

For more information on proxy rights, see help on "proxy".

ABUSE
Anyone who makes repeated queries to the Nameserver under program control
in order to circumvent normal restrictions on queries will be treated
as an abuser of the database.  Such persons will be subject to suspension
of CCSO service privileges and such other penalties as deemed appropriate
by the University.

SEE ALSO: areacodes, restaurants, timetable, weather, people, update,
proxy, edit, alias, aliases, interactive mode, no_update, login