Computing at UW-MadisonDivision of Information Technology
Students Faculty/Staff Services Services A through D Services E through L Services M through R Services S through Z Help Desk Tech Store About DoIT   

WiscChat Logo

Policies

Eligibility Policy
Appropriate Use
Privacy
Maintenance and Outage Windows

Eligibility Policy

All UW-Madison students and faculty/staff must have a VALID UW-Madison PhotoID in order to activate and keep their NetID accounts. Having a valid UW-Madison Photo ID does not imply that you must possess an actual physical card.

To be considered valid for NetID services one of the following must be true:

  1. You must be an officially registered student in the current semester. Students studying/working abroad must retain their registered student status with UW-Madison.
  2. You must have an official UW appointment. Those with limited term employee status (LTE) must have received a payroll issued check within 45 days of the current date to be considered eligible.
  3. You must be an officially retired faculty or staff member. Non-emeritus retirees must renew their status with their human resource department to insure eligibility.
  4. You must be a member of a group holding special authorization status with UW-Madison. This status is not granted to individuals nor is it granted by any informal request. Instead, this designation is reserved for pre-determined organizational entities.

For those who are no longer eligible, the following rules apply to deactivation of NetID services:

  1. NetID account deactivation will take place shortly after the “last day to add” of the Fall and Spring semesters each year.
  2. We will not deactivate NetID accounts between the last day of the Spring semester and the "last day to add" of the Fall semester.
  3. We will not deactivate NetID accounts between the last day of the Fall semester and the "last day to add" of the Spring semester.
  4. The initial phase of deactivations will only disable the non-eligible individual’s ability to dial into the Internet, check mail, access My UW-Madison, and access WiscCal. Mail sent to that person’s address will still be accepted.
  5. A grace period is available, by request only, to allow individuals to continue using NetID services for a specified amount of time. This grace period is intended to allow time to correct issues that may lead to reinstating eligibility or, for those who are indeed not eligible, to allow time to establish a private internet service provider (ISP) and set a forwarding address. The grace period will end on an advertised date, generally 2-4 weeks after the initial deactivation.
  6. The final phase of deactivations will take place in conjunction with the end of the grace period. Anyone who has not resolved outstanding issue will have his or her NetID account completely disabled.
  7. Forwarding addresses established before or during the grace period will be honored for a six month period. We reserve the right to exclude messages identified as highly likely to be bulk mail ( spam ) from the allowable forwarded mail.

WiscMail Plus users, please view the WiscChat Plus page for eligibility information.

Appropriate Use

WiscChat is a University of Wisconsin information technology resource. When using WiscChat, you must abide by the appropriate use policy that you agreed to when you activated your netid.

Privacy

The WiscChat vCard database is a publicly searchable directory. If you do not want any information about your account to be available to the public, do not publish a vCard. If you choose to publish a vCard, do not add any information to the vCard that you do not want to be available to the public.

Individual chat sessions are not logged on the WiscChat servers. Groupchat/conference room logging may be enabled by an administrator at the request of the room owner on a room-by-room basis. Individual and group chat session data may be logged by the chat clients of the individuals participating in that session.

Maintenance and Outage Windows

WiscChat service, like all other server based applications, requires outages to either update/patch server/application code or perform database maintenance.

The following maintenance/outage windows have been created:

Every Tuesday: 5am - 7am (tentative)