- Be civil. While swearing is allowed, derogatory slurs are not. Discussions on topics that are likely to be emotionally charged (e.g. religion, politics, etc.) are strongly discouraged, though permitted if everyone stays cordial.
- Keep your posts high-quality and on-topic. This is a hard one to quantify, but try to think of whether your post is actually contributing to the discussion or not. Talk to people, not at them. What may seem important to you may not be to others, and people read through forum threads much more frequently than other chat mediums. Asking questions is fine. Just use common sense. Posts considered too pointless or offtopic may get removed without warning.
- English only. Since most users and moderators here are English speakers, we simply cannot effectively moderate other languages.
- No spam/advertising/self-promotion, unless appropriate in the context of the discussion. i.e. don't just plug a video of yours asking people to watch, but if you've made something relevant that will contribute to the conversation, it can be posted.
- Attach images rather than hotlinking them. This is simply because images linked from other sites tend to go down, even from dedicated image hosting sites (e.g. Photobucket). Attaching them to this site ensures that they'll remain viewable for as long as this forum does.
- Avoid short pointless replies, e.g. "thanks!", "ok", "cool", etc. This may be permissible in some cases (i.e. for jokes/humor), but in most cases there are post reactions that serve the goal better.
- No adult content. This includes nudity, pornography, shock material, etc. There may be exceptions for software that includes nudity (e.g. God of War), but these must be spoilered and must have relevance to the discussion.
- Don't upload piracy to this website. This is a gray area, while this forum is devoted to software preservation, we also have a legal obligation to respect publishers who wish to enforce their copyrights, and (as a US-based website) are obligated to respond to DMCAs. If you want to preserve abandonware, you should upload it to archive.org, and if it's relevant to the discussion, it can be linked here (torrents may also be acceptable in some circumstances). However, such links may be removed at the discretion of moderators.
- Keep signatures relatively small. Massive images in signatures make threads hard to read. If your signature is too big, it will be removed.
- Only necropost when you have something meaningful to add. Necroposting refers to replying to a thread that has been inactive for a while (for the purposes of a clear rule, let's say 30 days). If you have something to contribute, e.g.
Rules
Rules
In general, these are the rules that apply to using and posting on this forum. I've tried to cover all use cases, but rules can be subjective and there can be exceptions. If you're unsure, reach out to a moderator before posting.