VGSites Guidelines

VGSites gives you your own page on the school’s platform. Students build a portfolio, a project, or whatever they want to show. Staff build whatever they want to share. You write the actual HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you decide when it goes live.

These rules are on top of the community guidelines, which apply everywhere on the platform. Read those first.

Your site is the most yours of anything on this platform. It is also at an address with the school’s name in it, which is where the rules below come from.

What you can build

Nearly anything. A portfolio, a project writeup, a game, a fan page, a place to dump the CSS experiments you are proud of, a résumé. It does not have to be about school and it does not have to be serious.

Two things worth saying out loud. Your site is public once you publish it, so anyone can read it, including people who are not at this school and including whoever reads your college applications. And it has your name on it in a way a post in a feed does not.

Beyond the platform-wide rules, do not put these on a site:

• A page that pretends to be a sign-in for anything. Not this platform, not the school, not Google, not a game. A fake login page on a school address is phishing, and it is the fastest way to lose your account and get the school involved. This holds even if you built it to prove a point or to prank one friend.
• Anything designed to attack a visitor or their browser, including malware, drive-by downloads, and code that exploits a bug in something else.
• Cryptocurrency mining, or any script that uses a visitor’s machine for your own work.
• A page whose purpose is to get around a school filter or to proxy other sites.
• Scripts that collect information about people who visit, including third-party analytics and tracking pixels. Counting your own page views is fine. Building a profile of your classmates is not.
• Using the site as file storage. If nothing links to it and it is not part of a page, it does not belong here.
• Anything pretending to be someone else, including a page presented as another student’s or as an official school page.

Code you did not write

Using a framework, a library, a CSS reset, or a template is normal and expected. Keep the license file, keep the credit, and do not claim you wrote it.

If you copy a whole site design, say where it came from. Somebody will recognize it, and a credit line costs you nothing.

Code an AI tool generated for you is fine to use. Presenting it as a portfolio piece you wrote yourself is the thing to think twice about, because the point of a portfolio is that it says something true about what you can do.

Publishing and versions

Nothing you edit goes live until you publish. The draft is yours alone, so save as often as you like and publish when it is ready.

The platform keeps snapshots of past versions so you can go back after breaking something. Only the most recent few are kept unless you pin them, so pin the version you care about rather than hoping it survives.

There is a size quota, and a hard cap above it that nothing gets past. If you are near it, the answer is usually smaller images rather than a bigger quota. There is also a limit on saves per day, which exists to stop a runaway script rather than to stop you working.

Sites expire and need renewing. If yours lapses it stops being public, and it is not deleted the moment it expires. Renew it and it comes back.

Other people on your site

If your site includes other people, get their agreement first. That covers photos, full names, quotes, and screenshots of conversations.

Do not put anyone’s contact details up, including your own. A phone number or a home address on a public page is available to everyone forever, and you cannot take it back once it has been indexed.

Group project pages need everyone in the group to be fine with what is on them, not just the person who owns the site.

Linking off the platform

You can link anywhere. Linking to something does not mean the platform endorses it, and nobody will read it that way.

What you cannot do is use a link to route around these rules. Publishing a page whose only purpose is to send people to content that would be removed if you hosted it here is the same violation as hosting it here.

Embedding other people’s content is fine when they allow embedding. Framing another site to make it look like part of yours is not.

When something is removed

Files publish immediately and get checked afterward, so a page can go up and then come down. If a file is removed, your site stays up without it.

Serious problems, like a phishing page, take the whole site offline at once rather than a file at a time. That is deliberate.

To appeal, open a ticket at /support. The full process is in the community guidelines. If your site was taken down for something you did not know was against the rules, say so, because the usual outcome for an honest mistake is that you fix it and it comes back.