Frequently asked questions.

A conference website on your own address — for example icas.iconf.me — that you build without writing code, and the machinery behind it: paper submission with peer review, a programme you schedule and publish, delegate registration, and a book of abstracts or proceedings at the end. You choose which of those you use; the ones you switch off disappear from your site entirely.

No. You choose a web address, pick a theme, and edit pages in your browser. There is nothing to install, no server to run and no DNS to configure.

Creating a conference takes a couple of minutes and generates a full set of draft pages. You can start from a blank site or from a worked example with real-looking content you then replace. How long before you publish depends on how much of your own material you have ready.

Yes. The Starter plan is free and stays free — one conference, one person, a published website — and there is no countdown on it. You can also build a conference in full before you pay for anything: write the pages, choose a design, upload your pictures and read the whole site on your own address. What a plan adds is the machinery around it, so you only pay when you need papers collected, a programme published or delegates registered.

Yes — a written guide with diagrams and screenshots of the real interface, covering each part of the platform in the order you would use it. It is linked from the menu inside your account and from the footer of this site.

Yes, until you publish. After publication the address is fixed, because changing it would break every link, printed programme and QR code already in circulation.

Not quite yet. Every conference gets an address under iconf.me. Using your own domain is built and being switched on — the last part is ours to arrange, not yours — so plan on the iconf.me address for now and ask us if you need the other before your call for papers opens.

Nine, and yes. Each has a full demo conference you can read before you choose — programme, fee table, speakers and all — linked from the theme picker and from the front page. They are designs rather than colour schemes: different layouts, different typefaces, different page furniture.

No. Themes change how your site looks, never what it says. Your pages are stored separately from the design, so you can preview every theme, switch, and switch back with nothing lost. A block a theme draws differently is still the same block, with the same words in it.

Yes. Each theme comes with a considered palette, and you can override the brand colour, the accent, the ink, the panel colour, the corner radius and the page width on top of it. Your logo and favicon sit in the same place. Typefaces are not adjustable: a theme's type is most of what makes it that theme, and the fonts are self-hosted rather than fetched from Google.

A page is a stack of blocks — headings, text, images, cards, tables, buttons, a countdown, contact details and more — and each one carries its own width, alignment and spacing. You can add, reorder, hide and delete them without touching code.

Upload them. Every image field takes a file straight from your computer, and everything you upload is kept in the conference's own library so you can use the same picture on several pages without uploading it twice. We convert each one to WebP and resize anything enormous, so your pages stay quick without you having to think about it.

Yes. Every save records a version and you can restore any earlier one. Restoring is itself recorded, so you can undo a restore too.

No. Pages are drafts until you publish them, and an unpublished conference address shows a "coming soon" page that search engines are told not to index.

It stays online as an archived edition under a dated address, so old links and citations keep working, while the main address moves on to the current year.

Yes, and it runs on your own conference website rather than somewhere else. Authors create an account on your site, submit their paper, and track it there. There is nothing for them to install and no third-party system to explain.

Yes. Review can be open, single-blind or double-blind, and you choose per conference. Under double-blind, reviewers do not see author names and authors do not see reviewer names.

You invite them by email and they accept from the link. You can record their areas of expertise, assign papers by hand, or let the platform propose assignments by matching topics — you always confirm before anything is sent.

Yes. You build the form your committee wants — scored criteria, free text, a recommendation — rather than working around somebody else's.

You record accept, reject or revisions requested against each paper, notify the authors, and collect the final version. Everything stays in one place, so the accepted paper you schedule is the paper you publish.

Yes. Submissions, reviewers and registrations all export to CSV, so your committee can work in a spreadsheet if that is what it prefers.

Yes. You set up rooms, days and sessions, and place accepted papers into them. Clashes — the same room at the same time — are caught as you work rather than found by a delegate.

You publish the programme to your website when it is ready, and only then. Until you do, it is yours to move around.

If you want them to. There is a switch for it, and it respects each author's own answer: where an author has refused permission for their abstract to be published, it stays hidden whatever the switch says.

Yes. You set your own rate types — student, academic, industry, workshop-only, whatever you need — each with its own price, dates and capacity, and delegates register on your own website.

Directly, by the means you already use: bank transfer, a QR code, or a payment link you hold with your own provider — PayPal, Stripe, a bank portal, whatever you have. The delegate uploads proof and you confirm it, and both of you get an email with the reference on it.

No — and that is a decision rather than a gap. Money that passes through us would make us a payment intermediary in your delegates' eyes, with our name on their statement and our refund terms between you and them. What is being built instead is a closer link to your own PayPal or gateway account, so a delegate can pay you by card from the registration page and the payment is confirmed without you checking a receipt by hand. The money still goes to you, and we still take none of it.

No, and we never will: the money does not pass through us and is not going to. Delegates pay you, into your account, on your terms. We charge you for the platform and nothing else.

You do. Delegates contract with you, not with us, so we cannot authorise a refund on your behalf. Our own refund policy covers platform subscriptions only.

Yes. You choose what goes in and in what order, and get a single PDF with a contents page and page numbers, built from the papers already in the system.

Authors are asked for it explicitly, per paper, and their answer is recorded with a timestamp. Nothing an author has refused is included, anywhere — including in the published programme.

Each volume comes with a machine-readable manifest listing every paper, its authors and its pages, which is what an ingest process asks for. Whether a particular publisher accepts it is between you and them.

What is switched on — submissions and peer review on one, and on the other the programme, delegate registration and publishing as well — plus how many people can work on the conference. Not how many papers you may receive: submissions, authors and reviewers are never counted on any plan. The current list and the prices are on the pricing page.

A plan's price is the price of one conference for twelve months, and you buy as many as you run — there is no tier to outgrow. The first five are full price and every conference after that is 20% less. You can see the totals on the pricing page before you sign up, and you choose the number at checkout.

Because that is the shape of the work. A conference runs from its call for papers to its proceedings over roughly a year, it is approved once against a budget line or a grant, and one invoice is easier to get through a finance office than a recurring charge somebody has to keep explaining. There is no monthly option: it existed, it cost 20% more over the same year, and it only ever made the real price look negotiable.

Yes. Card payment is live, for twelve months at a time or by the month, and the twelve-month price is the cheaper of the two. Prices are in Malaysian ringgit.

Not a timed one, and deliberately: the free plan does the same job without a clock. Build the site, see it on your own address, and pay when you want the parts a plan includes. If you subscribe and it is not what you expected, cancelling stops the renewal and you keep what you paid for until the period ends.

Your subscription runs to the end of the period you have already paid for and then stops renewing — so a conference bought for twelve months keeps everything for those twelve months, however early you cancel. You can resume it before then. Your website and your data stay where they are; the features your plan included stop being available, and past editions stay published.

There is a cooling-off window on platform subscriptions. The refund policy is the definitive statement of it, including how to ask.

Yes, at checkout. Codes are checked on our side rather than in your browser, so a code that has expired or run out is refused however it is entered.

Yes, on the paid plans. You invite them by email and they accept from the link; the free plan is a single seat, so inviting anybody means upgrading first.

Yes. There are roles — conference administrator, programme chair, content editor, registration manager, finance manager and viewer — and each sees only what its work requires. A content editor does not see delegates' payment details.

No. The plan belongs to the organisation that owns the conference, not to the person signed in. Invite them and they get everything that conference's plan includes, whatever their own account is on. What limits your team is the number of seats in your plan, not what each person pays.

Yes, and it is enforced at several independent levels rather than relying on any single check. An automated test suite specifically proves that one conference cannot read, edit or export another conference's data, and it runs on every change we make.

Yes. You can export your own account data at any time, and the working data — submissions, reviewers, registrations — exports to CSV from the pages it lives on.

Erasure is scheduled rather than instant, so an account closed by mistake can be recovered during a short grace period, and then the data is deleted or anonymised. The exact periods are in our privacy policy.

They have their own rights over their own data and their own page to exercise them, without having to go through you. Their accounts belong to your conference and are not shared with any other.

No. Only the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to protect forms against cross-site request forgery. Public conference websites set no advertising or analytics cookies at all.