Community Rules

Techist.com Community Rules

Thanks For Joining!
There is no charge for joining this Forum! This is a community of individuals who share a common interest in Computers and Computing. If you encounter any violations to these guidelines or have any problems navigating the site, do not hesitate to let us know through the Forums Contact Form (bottom of every page). We'll be happy to address your concerns.

Be Courteous!
Please think before you post and keep your comments limited to the topic at hand; above all be nice. We encourage everyone to participate in and enjoy the Community while at the same time adhering to these rules:
  • Our rules extend to all sections of the website including private messaging.
  • Do not engage in personal attacks. Challenge others' points of view and opinions, but do so respectfully and thoughtfully. Excessive sarcasm, extreme belligerence, insults, profanity, extreme anger, offensive comments about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and national origin, are not acceptable.
  • Do not post libelous remarks or directly misleading information.
  • Stay on topic by keeping discussions relevant and on track.
  • Harassment, flaming, stalking or predatory behavior will not be tolerated.
  • Do not post the same discussion in more than one forum.
  • Participants may not post or bump threads. Bumping is posting useless information, posting one-liners or any other action to deliberately keep a thread hot or to pad post counts.
  • Posts containing explicit, obscene or vulgar language, images or links to websites with adult content/images or punctuation marks designed to "trick" our obscenity filter will be removed.
  • Be mindful of yourself and others. This forum is not a democracy; it is privately owned and we make the rules. If rules are violated we retain the right at our discretion to remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or remove members. Any abuse toward our staff may/will result in immediate suspension of your account.
  • Public discussion about moderation or moderator decisions is not allowed. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned. Do not repost deleted material.
  • Do not start or participate in brand wars, i.e. my XXX brand is better than your XXXX brand without facts/benchmarks to support such an argument. The difference between an Nvidia 9800 GX2 and an ATI/AMD 4850 are documented and objective. Differences between PC and MAC are subjective and should be avoided.
  • NO SPAM! Our user base is not a resource to be "mined" by individuals, groups, or businesses, for profit or not for profit. Participants may not post affiliate links, chain letters, pyramid schemes or direct others to any pages at their own commercial website or website in which they have a commercial interest, including informational pages.
  • Fair warning; discussions about politics and religion are likely to be closed or removed if they turn into flame fests
  • We take the "be nice" rule VERY seriously! We do not tolerate rudeness.
Hacking, Cracking and Unlocking
Do not ask for or offer activation codes for software, links to Bit Torrents, instructions for breaking in to web sites, e-mail, message services, or software.
  • Discussion around the removal or recovery of passwords is limited to assistance contacting the Manufacturer (Hardware), Original Owner (Software/OS/File) or Site Authority (Web based).
  • Discussions/posts regarding techniques/assistance 'hacking' are not permitted.
  • Posts containing illegally shared data are not allowed. This includes, but is not limited to, linking download sites/methods (regardless of protocol) to illegal or copyrighted material. Only open source/freeware/owner sponsored (e.g. office.microsoft.com) links may be shared.


Posting Standards
Forum members should use the standard fonts available on the forum. The standard font size is 2. The use of bold, large or colored fonts should be used sparingly. Posts containing inappropriate formatting will be removed or modified at our discretion; e.g. all caps or excessive color.

E-mail and web address are not appropriate forum user names.

Posts should be well formatted. Use paragraphs, punctuation, and capital letters appropriately. Excessive use of Netspeak/LOLspeak (internet slang) and texting shortcuts (b4, str8, etc) is not permitted. Posts with violations may be edited or deleted without notification.

The language of this forum is English. If you are not a native English speaker, do your best. We are glad to have you as a member and will be supportive and polite.

Do not post protected or copyrighted material. Information copyrighted or owned by any individual or entity other than the member should not be posted on the discussion forums without the consent of the owner. If such an event occurs, the individual posting the information shall be held solely responsible. You cannot legally post entire articles or news in the forum without permission from the copyright holder. Even if you attribute the article correctly it’s still copyright infringement. Under Fair Use provisions you may legally post a small abstract of an article - or perhaps the opening paragraph. In either case please post a link to source. The exception to this rule is press releases; they are meant for distribution and can be copied and posted in their entirety. If you are not sure if you can copy something then always err on the side of caution and simply post a link to the material.

Signature Standards
Signatures may be used by established members who have reached 25 posts. Signatures must be setup in your profile rather than manually added to your messages. They will appear at the bottom of every post you make.
  • Signatures must be kept to a maximum of 5 lines (including blank lines) and 2 non-commercial links.
  • Signatures may not include email addresses, phone numbers, links to competing websites, prompts to contact or a sales pitch.
  • Signatures must follow our forums posting standards.
Commercial Hosting Posts and Site Reviews
  • Owners/representatives of hosting companies may post hosting package details in response to information requests in the General Hosting Forums only. Your package must be within or over 30% of the disk space, bandwidth etc. asked for in the request. If your package does not match the request within 30%; it will be removed.
  • Members may request a site review in this section. Site reviews are intended to aide website development and not for advertising purposes.
  • Responses to requests for specific information by members may include a link to your webpage provided the information is pertinent to the question.
Classifieds Use
Our classifieds system is offered as a benefit of membership, no commercial sales are permitted. We expect ads placed to be related to the topic of this forum.
  • Include the name of the item in the title of your post
  • Place only one ad per item - do not post or repost an ad in more than one section of the classifieds.
  • Do not place ads directing others to an e-bay or other online sale or directing others to another website.
  • Your ad must contain a digital photograph of the item alongside of a handwritten note with your username and the date the picture was taken.
  • Ads may be removed by our staff at any time for any reason.

Dealer/Vendor and Customer Disputes
This forum is not intended to be a mechanism for people to solely vent frustrations about vendors or sales from private parties. Please settle your differences with the seller, manufacturer and dealer through the long-established legal or arbitration systems or the Better Business Bureau but not through our community.

About the First Amendment, censorship and your "right to free speech"
We believe in public freedom of speech but that right does not infer that others have to publish your speech. Techist.com is not a public resource; it is privately owned and we require members to abide by our rules and by the decisions of our staff. If you post outside these guidelines your post may be edited or deleted - any law or constitutional right your country may have regarding freedom of speech does not apply to this site.


Site Management, Member Concerns & Account Closure
If we feel site rules are violated we may remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or restrict account access. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned or any other member of our site team. Do not repost deleted material. This forum is largely self-policing, which means that moderators will respond and react to problems reported through the REPORT POST option, via the CONTACT FORM at the bottom of each page, or via PM. Do not hesitate to use these tools to report any problems regarding the forum.

Requests for changes to your account should be made by using the Contact Us link at the bottom of every forum page.

Participants may only have one account. Moderators may consolidate or delete multiple accounts.

We may remove accounts that have no posts. If the account has many posts, completely deleting the account can significantly disrupt thread continuity. In that event, we may (at our discretion) disable your account in some or all of the following ways: change the user name, remove signature content, subscriptions, avatar and identifying information or replace it with fictitious info. We may change account options to refuse contact and/or ban the account. Where communication features were used to share information with other individuals (e.g., sending a personal message to another Forum user) we generally cannot remove content. If someone quoted your post, the original user name will be shown as having been quoted (which we cannot purge).

Someone has to interpret the above guidelines and how they apply to this forum. Ultimately it's up to our site team to make this decision. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please feel free to contact us.


Registering and participating at Techist.com constitutes agreement to abide by these rules and to abide by the Social Knowledge Network Terms of Service (Social Knowledge is the company that owns this forum). We reserve the right to modify these rules at any time without giving prior notice.
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