Gatemasters

Gatemasters at simegen.com are very special people. They each keep a part of our domain in existence and running smoothly, attracting visitors to our domain. Gatemasters and Assistant Gatemasters design and supervise Areas such as Romance, Boards, Reviews, Electronic Greeting Cards, the WorldCrafters Guild, the individual Review Columns, and other Areas in existence and yet to be built.

We are very grateful to our Gatemasters. They are the reason we have grown to the point at which we can attract advertisers to begin paying the domain owners back for what they have put into this project.

In return, we offer Gatemasters the opportunity to share in the revenue obtained from individual advertising (not agency ads). We would love to see all Gatemasters earn commissions.

From our inception, we have been set up to share revenue with Gatemasters who either bring us individual advertisers, or take on the work of creating banners or websites for individual advertisers. Although this program has seen little success so far, it is still in place. See our
Revenue Sharing program.

Click on the buttons to have the following questions answered:

How can I become a simegen.com Gatemaster?

What are the benefits of becoming a Gatemaster?

Why not just create my own site instead of working for simegen.com?

What does a Gatemaster do?

Who owns the pages I build on simegen.com?

How do I sign up?

What are the legal disclaimers?


Would you like to be a simegen.com Gatemaster? There are two ways to go about becoming one:

1. Suggest an Area that you are expert in and have ideas to implement. Thus far we have our Writing School, the Romance Area, our Greeting Card project, Reviews, and several more. An Area on Poetry is in the planning stages. We would love to have Areas devoted to Music, or Crafts, or Dance, or Graphic Arts--anything that is creative is at home at simegen.com, as you can tell by our motto: Where Sime and Gen meet, Creativity Happens.

2. Watch our announcements for times when one of our Gatemasters is leaving, and if you would like to be considered as a replacement in that Area, please let us know. Excellent experience for becoming a Gatemaster is to be an Assistant Gatemaster in one of the Areas that has become so complex that the work must be delegated. Assistant Gatemasters may also earn money through our revenue sharing program.

When you have found a job you want, first contact the appropriate person at simegen.com (the e-mail address of that person will be associated with each job on the Help Wanted page), or, if you want to suggest your own job, write to simegen@simegen.com.

When you have been accepted for your new position, fill out and return the agreement form. Once we have received that form by either snailmail or fax, we will notify you and give you the necessary information to be able to post to your area of simegen.com.


What do you get for being a simegen.com Gatemaster?

1. Satisfaction. A site you can put on your career resume and say, "I designed this Area of the domain, and I keep it running efficiently." Perhaps a little fame and glory. A great deal of gratitude. And, we hope, fun.

2. A free homepage (this is not the Gateway page you manage, but your own personal website) where you may express yourself as you please, within the bounds of our general
Webmasters Agreement.

3. The possibility of earning money. How much? That depends on you. The more individual advertisers you bring to simegen.com, and the more pages and banners you design for them, the more you earn.

Why share revenue with simegen.com when I can set up my own website, sell advertising, and keep all the revenue?

No reason at all, if you have the time, energy, and investment to build a domain. We wish you every good fortune in doing so, and hope that when you have accomplished your goal we can exchange links.

What does a simegen.com Gatemaster have to do?

1. Be eighteen years old or older.

2. Design and maintain a public Area of simegen.com. New Gatemasters of established Areas may redesign their Areas, except that they may not remove or discontinue successful elements such as boards or chats without the approval of the Webmaster and the owners of simegen.com. They must also maintain the Gateway Page and associated pages in a format compatible with the current overall design of simegen.com, which may change from time to time.

3. Keep the simegen.com owners and Webmaster apprised of your activities (new pages, new services, chats, contests, etc.) so that we can promote them.

4. Send anyone you bring aboard to assist you to this page to read the terms for Gatemasters and Assistant Gatemasters and fill out and submit the necessary paperwork. No one may work on the public pages of simegen.com without submitting the agreement form.

5. Let us know of any problems, technical or otherwise. If the Webmaster and/or the owners do not know about a problem, they cannot attempt to correct it. Communication is the key to success as a simegen.com Gatemaster.

6. Let us know if you cannot continue as Gatemaster. Everyone has times when health, family, career, or simply new interests suddenly make what had been enjoyable a chore. When that happens, don't feel guilty--we will thank you with all our hearts for what you have accomplished, and ask your help in finding someone to replace you. However, you must give us thirty days' notice of your departure, to allow us time to find another Gatemaster for your Area. If a new Gatemaster is willing to take over your duties before that time is up, as long as you both agree the transition may occur before the thirty days are up.

7. Place our advertising on your pages. This is our best hope of obtaining revenue. If simegen.com earns no revenue, while it continues to accumulate monthly expenses, eventually there will be no "there" there, for you to design sites on. Therefore, we must require that all Gatemasters put our ad carousels on public pages under their control. Our webmasters will give you the appropriate code for either our internal (things happening on simegen.com) carousel or our external (paid banner ads) carousel. All you have to do is paste that code into the top of each page you are responsible for. On short pages (one screen or just over one screen) it may be placed at the bottom.

We also ask, if the opportunity arises, that you make an honest effort to solicit individual advertising. If you work with e-publishers, see if they would like to run a banner ad in our carousel. If you create crafts and always obtain your supplies from the same source, find out if they'd like to place an ad. If you can get individual ads, design banners for those ads, etc., you share in the revenue brought in.

8. Assure that all web pages within your Area comply with the simegen.com
Webmasters Agreement. This compliance includes acceptance and inclusion of advertising.

9. Maintain backups of pages, policies, and personnel.

Pages: you must keep at least two copies of the pages you create for simegen.com (on two computers, or on your hard drive and on any kind of removable media such as floppy or zip disk, tape backup, or CDRW). If you prefer, you may send copies to your backup person.

Policies: you must either post any policies, instructions, methods, etc. by which you conduct your Area of simegen.com to the /smof area of simegen.com or provide copies of such policies, instructions, methods, etc. to your backup person.

Personnel:
every Gatemaster, Assistant Gatemaster, or other volunteer who has keys to post to public pages of simegen.com shall have a backup person who is also a Gatemaster, Assistant Gatemaster, or other volunteer with keys to public pages. Your backup person will have access to your pages in case of emergency, you will exchange telephone and fax (if any) numbers, and you will send to your backup person e-dresses of people you are in contact with for simegen.com projects in progress (examples are editors, authors, book reviewers, potential advertisers, artists for the greeting card project), and any other information that person requires to back you up if you cannot do your job. Your backup person is the one you call when you have a personal emergency. If you can e-mail or reach that person by chat (you just had a family emergency and must leave town for a week), use it--but if your computer just blew up and you won't be back on-line until it is repaired, reach your backup person by telephone. The responsibility of the backup person is to notify the staff of simegen.com of your emergency, notify anybody who is expecting a response from you, and under ordinary circumstances that is all. Only in certain special circumstances (an advertiser has paid to have an ad begin running on your pages right in the middle of your emergency time away) will your backup person actually use the access to your pages, and only with the Webmaster's permission. It is expected that backup persons will simply hold the line in emergencies, not take over a whole other job. However, when you have a planned time away (everyone deserves a vacation, while we all have other responsibilities that limit our ability to work on simegen.com at times), we will arrange for your backup person as well as other staff members as necessary to cover for you.
10. Create graphics for use all over simegen.com. This tenth point is not a requirement, as not all Gatemasters have the talent or skills to do so. If you would like to contribute graphics to the /images bin for the use of all webmasters on simegen.com, please read and submit our Image Agreement. Once again, there is no requirement that Gatemasters be able to create original graphics.

11. Make certain that credit is given for any graphics you have obtained from a public domain graphics site, created with CoolText, or otherwise obtained from anywhere except the simegen.com Image Bin. Our ultimate goal is to replace all public domain images with those created by our staff under our Image Agreement. However, that will take a long time, so in the meantime it is your responsibility to be certain our public pages are both legal and courteous.

12. Participate in "Hats." We have a mailing list, hats@simegen.com, which goes to all our staff. You will be placed on that list when you become a Gatemaster or Assistant Gatemaster. You must not block Hats from your e-mail, because it brings all announcements of importance to all or some of our staff. Some messages will not pertain to you, but many will, such as when there may be a planned interruption of service, when Agreements are updated, when new tools become available, etc.

Who owns the pages I build on simegen.com?

You own the pages on the personal website that is provided to you, and may change them or remove them from simegen.com at your pleasure without notice.

Sime~Gen Inc. and simegen.com own the pages you create for the Area of which you are Gatemaster. However, you own any text that you write for those pages, any artwork you create for them (except images you place in the /images bin), and any design elements you create yourself, with the exception of those on the Gateway Page (index.html) and related underlying pages for your Area. The Webmaster will inform you of precisely which pages in your Area fall under this requirement. Usually you may expect to be asked to incorporate design elements on these pages that connect them to the overall design of simegen.com. If you are creating something you will wish to remove from simegen.com and take with you when you leave, simply put it on a page other than the Gateway pages for your Area. For all other pages in your Area, you license to Sime~Gen Inc. and simegen.com the Internet display rights to all text, graphics, or design elements you create for the Area you are responsible for, for the duration of your time as Gatemaster and for ninety days thereafter. After that time, we will continue to display your work in the Area in which you were Gatemaster only with your express permission.

Gatemasters of our Book Review sites have a different situation from other Gatemasters, because usually they write only a few of the reviews, while the rest are written by other people. The reviews written by people other than the Gatemaster of a book review site are not the intellectual property of the Gatemaster, but of the reviewers. See our
Reviewers Agreement for the terms of copyright and licensing governing such book reviews.

Those who write our Review Columns, such as Rereadable Books, the Vampire Books columns, the Horror column, and any other review columns written primarily by a single person, are considered Assistant Gatemasters and operate under the terms of this agreement. They have autonomy as to the content of their sites, provided they do not violate the terms of our general Webmaster's Agreement, but for technical matters they come under the direction of the Reviews Gatemaster.

How do I sign up?

To apply for an advertised Gatemaster position, contact simegen@simegen.com.

If you would like to create a new Area on simegen.com, contact simegen@simegen.com.

If you would like to assist one of the Gatemasters (all of them can use help with something), go to the Gateway Page of that Area and send e-mail to the Gatemaster.

When your application is accepted, fill out and return the agreement form. Once that is done, you may begin work on your Area.

Legalities:

Everything in this document concerning Gatemasters is intended to apply to Assistant Gatemasters and anyone else who posts to the public pages of simegen.com as well.

Sime~Gen Inc. or simegen.com may terminate a Gatemaster's tenure for cause at any time without notice. Otherwise, Sime~Gen Inc. or simegen.com may terminate a Gatemaster's tenure by giving thirty days' notice of termination by e-mail, fax, or postal mail.

Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to constitute the parties herein as joint venturers nor shall any similar corporate or individual relationship be presumed to exist between them.

The terms of this agreement may be changed from time to time as necessity arises.

Agreeing to become a Gatemaster or continuing as a Gatemaster at simegen.com constitutes agreement with the terms set forth on this page, as updated. All Gatemasters will be notified of updates.

Where Sime and Gen meet, creativity happens.

This page created with Arachnophilia.

See all our Agreements


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