Web Awards

Australian Model Railway Association Incorporated Ethics

The evaluators for the AMRA "Great Site" and "You've Struck Gold" award programmes hereby declare that we are dedicated to upholding the ethics and standards stated in this declaration in order to ensure fairness to all applicants and to maintain the honour and integrity of applicants, evaluators, and awards.

All applicants who meet the set criteria for our Great Site Award as posted on the site shall be eligible to receive that award. We are uniform in our eligibility requirements and fairly evaluate all web sites meeting our criteria which are submitted by any applicant. All web sites shall be judged using the criteria in effect at the time that the application is received. Where changes have recently been made to the criteria and any doubt exists as to the criteria posted on the site at the time of submission then the web site will be judged by both the new and old criteria and shall be eligible for the award if either criteria is met.

A preliminary review of all submissions received shall be performed within one week of receipt of the application and in most instances a complete evaluation of the site should be completed within that timeframe. As evaluation of submitted sites is a voluntary task performed by members of our Association there will be occasions where other tasks take priority and so we expect that there will be occasions where a full evaluation of a site may take longer. Where evaluations cannot be completed within seven weeks of receipt, we shall suspend submissions until such time as these timeframes can once more be met. We shall also notify the applicants of any outstanding submissions of the delay.

We shall advise any applicant immediately in writing of a "Refrain to Evaluate" where a conflict of interest would occur in evaluating a web site for our award. In this instance, efforts shall be made to find an acceptable alternate evaluator.

Sites that contain material considered to be not suitable for children or which display images that are in breach of copyright will definitely be excluded from consideration for our awards. We will not grant awards to, or in any other manner endorse or promote, any web site that endorses, promotes, or contains content which is considered globally to be illegal or discriminatory. We do not discriminate on the grounds of scale or prototype modelled, race, gender, nation of origin, religion, profession, mental or physical handicap, or any other reason which is not globally viewed as an illegal trait or manner of conduct.

We shall not divulge any information about any applicant to any person, group, or agency not directly involved in the judging of our awards. All information received from award applicants by whatever means shall be treated as private and confidential and shall only be used for the purpose for which it has been supplied.

We will maintain a professional, friendly, and positive manner in any correspondence or other communication with applicants. Any critiques given shall be constructive in nature. We acknowledge that other web sites may have different ideas or priorities with regard to good web design.

The evaluation process used to determine sites that qualify for our awards has been developed independently of the award criteria in use by any other site and the posted evaluation process is copyright Felgall Pty Ltd and is used with permission of the copyright holder. Written authorization shall be required for the use of any element of our award criteria and scoring method in any other award programme. The AMRA web site is maintained to a standard that exceeds the minimum criteria for the AMRA Great Site Award.

We will not accept any favours of any sort in return for preferential treatment of any submission.

Award winners shall be listed as such on the appropriate page of our site. While we would prefer that winning sites display their award as a link back to the AMRA web site there is no requirement that they do so. Sites shall be granted an award on the basis that they meet the criteria at the time that the award is given. Should a web site not maintain the standard required to meet the criteria then we may remove the link from our site and/or request that the web site cease displaying our award. We will take all measures necessary to maintain the honour and integrity of our awards.