The HTML versions placed here by the NESFA Rules Committee are the official versions, and have been certified by the Rules Committee to be correct as of their stated dates.
There is an archive of older versions of these files.
Recent proposed changes to the By-Laws and the Standing Rules are stored in a pending file, awaiting perfection (a term of art in the rules business) or review before they are folded into the official HTML files.
In addition to decisions for immediate action, NESFA enacts two types of enduring rules:
By intention, every section, sub-section, sub-sub-section, etc. of the By-Laws and Standing Rules can be directly linked to by a URL that (again, by intention) will never change. (If anyone finds a section for which this is not true, please inform the Rules Committee.) This capability is used extensively within the By-Laws and Standing Rules to link related and referred-to sections, but is also available for use from elsewhere (for example, many of the Treasury procedures at /Treasury/ link to the rules underlying them).
The form of these URLs is standardized, so that someone who wishes to link to a section can deduce the correct URL without having to examine its HTML source.
The By-Laws exist as a single file, with URL <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/Bylaws.html>. The beginning of each article has its own link and may be reached by the URL <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/Bylaws.html#blX> (where "X" is the article number).
The Standing Rules exist as a single file, with URL <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/SR.html>. The beginning of each section has its own link and may be reached by the URL <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/SR.html#srX> (where "X" is the section number, or "a" for Appendix A).
To link to a specific section, append a fragment identifier to the URL for the appropriate file; that identifier is derived from the section, sub-section, etc. "numbering" by concatenating its elements, in order, separated by ":" – for example, section 1.7(5)II would become 1.7:5:II, article 5.3(c) would become 5.3:c, and section A.2(7) would become a.2:7. This value is prefixed with "bl" for a By-Laws item or "sr" for a Standing Rules item and then appended to the file's URL, set off by a "#". The full URLs for these examples would be <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/SR.html#sr1.7:5:II>, <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/Bylaws.html#bl5.3:c>, and <http://www.nesfa.org/rules/SR.html#sra.2:7>.
Whenever possible, please link to the By-Laws and Standing Rules rather than quoting from them – quotes tend to be forgotten when the original text is updated, and so all too frequently end up outdated. If you must quote (for instance, when writing a procedure to be followed in detail, where following a link to get some bit of information would break up the flow), please also link to the [sub]section quoted and inform the Rules Committee of what you've done. This will allow us to add to the annotation for that [sub]section a "quoted in" link back to your page, so we can ensure that it is updated if the underlying rule is changed. A link adjacent to your quote both is useful to anyone who wants to check the details of the underlying rule and makes it likely that the Rules Committee will eventually discover your quote even if you forget to tell us about it.
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