Beermad's linking policy
Beermad receives many requests for links from this site, so in order to save your time and mine, please read these guidelines before asking me to link to your site. It is my aim to provide a collection of links which lovers of real ale will find
relevant as well as interesting. I will not link to sites which I don't
personally consider fit in with the ethos of my site.
Only breweries (and other beer producers), pubs & bars and online beer sellers are now linked from Beermad, as maintaining an extensive collection of other links takes a disproportionate amount of effort. Only sites within Europe are linked for the same reason.
Beermad has very strict criteria for the linking of any site. Before requesting a link, please take a few moments to review this list of things that will automatically disqualify a website from being linked by Beermad and if your site fails any of them, please don't waste your time or mine as it
will not get a link.
Sites that will not be linked from beermad under any circumstances
- Sites for pubs or bars that don't sell traditional beers as defined by Camra or the country's EBCU member. The sort of people who use Beermad are interested in what beers they can find in a pub, so only those sites with information about which beers are sold will be included. "We sell real ale" is not sufficient.
- Sites designed to only work in Internet Explorer. There are published standards for Web sites which Microsoft has deliberately corrupted in order to abuse its near-monopoly. To link to such a site would be to collaborate in Bill Gates' desire to own the Internet.
- Sites which inflict pop-ups on their visitors.
- Sites consisting of nothing but a single page with little or no information on it. I find particularly annoying sites that say things like "coming soon" which haven't been touched for several years, demonstrating that there's actually no intention whatsoever to put anything up. A particular example of this is the Brouwerij De Ranke whose website, when I visited it in December 2008 said "Opening end July 2005 - Please come back !"
- Sites rendered wholly or predominantly in Flash, unless there is a way to bypass it to navigate the site. Since this technology has terrible security holes in it and also doesn't work properly in all browsers.
- Sites that play music or other noise. When I'm using my computer to listen to music or timeshifted radio programmes, I don't appreciate somebody imposing their choice of sound on me. I don't go into your workplace and play my radio so please have the courtesy not to do the equivalent to me.
- Sites containing racist, sexist, homophobic or overt religious material (although an exception will be made for the latter in the case of Trappist breweries.)
- Sites run by, or on behalf of, any company, organisation or person known to be, or to have been, responsible for Spam or those who, in my experience, are too careless to prevent repeated virus transmissions from their computers.
- Sites which require cookies, except where they're needed for legitimate purposes such as shopping or helping visitors navigate. Beermad doesn't invade its visitors' privacy and doesn't like websites that do.
- http://welcome.to/ sites will not be linked under any circumstances, as that domain always spits out pop-up windows that crash my browser. Sorry if this means your site is excluded, but I won't link to anything that causes that kind of problem.