Official BSA Unit Website Guidelines — Updated 06/07/2020
The following policy can also be found here on the BSA National website.
Unit Website Guidelines
We’ve long recognized that unit sites created by individuals at the unit level of Scouting are essentially personal, and therefore beyond the National Council’s control or liability. We do offer advisory guidelines to those who publish Scouting-related sites on their own responsibility, and we urge local councils to take the same approach. These guidelines are established to help avoid several common mistakes.
Protection of personal information pertaining to our youth members and volunteers should be our greatest concern. This organization has used COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, as its standard in this area. You can read the details on compliance at http://www.coppa.org/comply.htm. It would be a good practice to share them with unit-level publishers in your council.
A second concern about individual unit sites is copyright infringement. Sadly, photos, music, and video are commonly reused on the Web without permission. Plagiarism is also common. Such practices violate the ethics of Scouting. They are also violations of law, and could expose the publishers legally.
Our third concern is commercialism. We don’t allow ads on council sites. We recognize that “free” Web services often used to create unit-level sites may contain advertising. This practice may reflect poorly on the Scouting brand, and should be avoided. A more serious concern would be sites that engage in any fund-raising activities not previously approved by their local council. Any independent sales, solicitation, OR collection of donations is prohibited by our bylaws and charter agreements.
- The content of the unit site must be appropriate to the Scouting movement.
- The unit site cannot link to any sites that contain material that is not appropriate to the Scouting movement.
- The unit site should not contain any advertisements or commercial endorsements.
- The unit site cannot engage in the electronic sale of BSA Supply Division merchandise or competing products.
- The unit site cannot replicate any BSA publication currently for sale through the Supply Division.
- Unit sites must abide by all laws regarding copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property, and by those pertaining to the Internet.
- Unit sites must consider the safety and privacy of their members and participants by obtaining the necessary permissions to release information about or images of any individual.
- Unit sites cannot engage in fund-raising except as directly approved by, and under the supervision of, the local council.
Webmaster’s Disclaimer
In order for information to appear on this website, all information concerning camping, meetings, and eagle projects MUST be submitted in writing via email or hard document. This is set in place in order to try to limit the amount of false information posted on the site.
This website only posts Troop 93 and Boy Scout related information such as Eagle Projects, general High Adventure information, camping, Court of Honors, requirement changes, etc. For further information such as cub scouting, specific high adventure, etc, please see the associated links on the side bar.
All new information will usually get posted generally every Tuesday provided it followed a regularly scheduled meeting. The site also gets major advancement/calendar/design changes between the Summer break and winter break.
All photos on this website are either courtesy of various troop members, the webmaster, or owned by the National Boy Scouts. Any outside image or link will be cited below the link or image.
Thank you.