A note on method
How the notices are checked
The one thing a paper can do that a search engine cannot is stay current. Here is exactly how that works, including how it fails.
Once a week, early on a Sunday, an automated reader visits each charity's public volunteering page and notes what has changed since last time. It says who it is, honours whatever the site's robots file asks of it, and makes one request a second — about the load of one person reading a couple of pages.
Anything that matters is read by a person before it is printed. Changes to what a charity asks of you, whether a post is open, or when the next intake falls never go in automatically. Those are the facts that waste your day if they are wrong.
Silence is set as silence. Most charity pages do not say whether a check is needed, and where a page does not say, the notice says exactly that. It is less satisfying than a clean answer and rather more honest.
If this paper stops being set
- After 3 weeks
- Notices stop printing anything we can no longer stand behind, and keep only the link.
- After 2 months
- A notice on every page says the paper is no longer being kept up, and points you elsewhere.
Why bother A stale sheet that admits it is worth more than a fresh-looking one that misleads. The decay above is built in rather than hoped for.