Community Guidelines

HardGaming Forums is a place to ask questions, share what you have built, and help other people get further than they would have alone. These guidelines describe what that looks like in practice, and what happens when a post falls short of it.

What this forum is for

Hardware, builds, troubleshooting and games. Ask the question you actually have, in enough detail that somebody can answer it. Post the specs, the error, the thing you already tried. A thread that helps one person is usually a thread that helps the next hundred who search for the same problem, which is why threads here are public and stay public.

What we expect

Argue with the post, not the person. Disagreement is most of what a forum is for. Contempt is not.
Answer honestly. If you are guessing, say you are guessing. Confident wrong answers cost the person asking more than no answer would have.
Post where it belongs. Categories exist so people can find things.
Give credit. If a benchmark, an image or a fix is somebody else's, say whose.
One account per person. Accounts exist so a reputation can accumulate; several accounts for one person defeats that.

What gets removed

Spam — advertising, referral links, or the same post in six places.
Harassment — targeting a person, pile-ons, threats, slurs, or posting somebody's personal information.
Off-topic — content with no plausible relationship to this forum's subject.
Misinformation — claims presented as fact that are demonstrably not, particularly where acting on them costs money or hardware.
Adult or graphic content — this is not the place for it.
Anything unlawful, including piracy and circumvention.

Reporting something

Every post and reply has a report control. You will be asked to pick one of the reasons above and may add a description. Reports go to a moderation queue that only moderators can see, and the person you reported is not told who reported them.

You can see what became of your own reports at My Reports. Reporting something you simply disagree with is not useful to anyone, and repeated bad-faith reporting is itself a violation.

Automatic hiding

Content that accumulates 4 open reports is hidden automatically, before a moderator has looked at it, and then reviewed by a person. This is a holding action, not a verdict — it exists so that something genuinely abusive is not on screen for hours while it waits in a queue.

Two things bound it, because an automatic mechanism is also a mechanism to abuse. Reports only count towards it from accounts at least 7 days old with at least 3 contributions, so a handful of accounts registered this morning cannot take a thread down. And once a moderator has reviewed something and decided to leave it up, the threshold rises to 6 — a decision a human has already made is not quietly reversed by the next few reports.

What moderators can do

When a report is actioned, a moderator may:

Dismiss it — the content stays, and any automatic hide is undone.
Remove the post or reply.
Lock a thread, which leaves it readable but closes replies.
Warn you. A warning appears the next time you open the forum and has to be acknowledged before you can continue.
Suspend your account for a period, or permanently.

Threads are also locked automatically after a long stretch with no replies. That is housekeeping rather than a judgement about the thread.

Edits are on the record

Editing your own post or reply is expected — fixing a mistake is better than leaving it. But every edit is recorded, and the revision history of any post is visible to anyone reading the thread. Editing a post to change what you were answering, after somebody answered, is not something the forum can hide for you.

If you think a decision was wrong

Moderators get things wrong. Contact [PLACEHOLDER: appeals contact address] with the thread or reply and what you think happened. Appeals are read by a person.

Changes

These guidelines will change as the forum does. Material changes will be announced on the forum rather than quietly edited in.

See also the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.