Read This First

Welcome to the Tom's Hardware forums. Here we talk about computer hardware, software, gadgets, gaming, and geekery in general. Speech is free but Tom's Hardware is moderated. We like people who make sense, stay-on-topic, and play nice.

Tom's Hardware Rules of Conduct

The Rules of Conduct are general guidelines for regular users on acceptable behavior in the Tom's Hardware forums. These guidelines may change at the discretion of the Community Manager as necessary to foster an environment appropriate to civil discourse. This outline is a basic set of guidelines and does not encompass every foreseeable event, and individual infractions will be dealt with by moderators on a per incident basis. The Community Manager and Moderation Team has sole discretion on how to interpret and apply these rules to circumstances and situations, including discipline or exception. The Rules of Conduct also include adherence to Tom's Hardware website Terms of Service, located at http://www.tomshardware.com/terms.html.

Do...

• Search the forums. Someone else may have already answered your question/discussed the topic.
• Read the stickies. They answer a lot of questions, and are great reads too!
• Use paragraphs, and avoid walls of text that are hard to read.
• Provide details on what is going wrong, and how. Share your hardware specs and OS, when applicable.
• Keep criticism constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.
• Check out our guide to posting images and styling your posts. You can also see how other users do the same by clicking "BBCode" above their post.
• Report violators to the Moderation Team by clicking "Report" above the post.

Don't...

• Post in ALL CAPS or use excessive punctuation!!!
• Share personal information, like your email address. Identify theft is real.
• Bump posts, claim "first!"
• Hijack a topic. Stick to the original conversation.
• Ask for help pirating, cracking passwords, or bypassing copyright protection

Signatures

• An imported signature banner shall be no larger than 75 x 400 size, and you will be allowed to display only one banner.
• If the banner contains forwarding links to either past or present websites that have caused problems at THGF, your signature privileges will be suspended.

Violations - It violates the Tom's Hardware Rules of Conduct if you engage in any of the following activity:

• Post, promote or distribute any content that is illegal.
• Promote or encourage activity which is illegal, such as hacking, cracking, scamming.
• Harass, threaten, embarrass or insult other users, including sending unwanted messages, attacking race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Ad hominem attacks are not permitted.
• Hate speech is not permitted. You may not post or distribute content that is harmful, abusive, racist, homophobic, sexually explicit, defamatory, infringing, invasive of privacy, or objectionable.
• Disrupt the natural flow of forum discussion through vulgar language, spamming, flooding, or any variant.
• Trolling, defined as knowingly soliciting strong negative responses simply for shock value.
• Posting off-topic posts in inappropriate forums.
• Impersonation.
• Phishing. A moderator will never ask for your password.
• Upload or link to files which contain a virus or malware.
• Make posts to advertise or promote, forward chain letters, pyramid schemes or multi-level marketing programs.

Two more things: Forum accounts are non-transferable. Actions taken by a user on one account may affect all of that user's accounts.

With these in mind, please remember to have fun. Most of these guidelines are common sense, and serve to keep the forums useful for everyone. We thank you for your cooperation and support in this, and if you have any suggestions or feedback regarding the Rules of Conduct, please contact a Moderator.

Thanks for being a part of the Tom's Hardware Community!