Rules sections

Board rules

These rules are disclosed to clarify the various responsibilities of all community members here on exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum. They shall be adhered to by everyone to ensure that our board runs smoothly and provides a fun and productive experience for all of our community members and visitors.

  1. Main Rules

    1. Respect the moderators.
      Moderators are here to help and maintain order. Moderators actions are final and must be respected. Do not argue and abuse the moderator team as you will be banned. #
    2. Keep on topic.
      We all get side-tracked from time to time and this will be allowed to a point. Though please keep to the topic at hand. If you want to drift onto another subject, please open up a new thread. #
    3. Where to post.
      As this is a new forum, there will likely be topics not listed in the main forum topics list. Do not chose some random topic to post in, if you feel a new forum topic needs to be opened, then contact a moderator or use the chat forum to ask about it. For example, do no discuss boosters in the RAM section, or post boosters for sale in the booster sections. There is a dedicated for sale section for that. #
    4. Chat Forum
      The chat forum is exactly that, a place for general chat about anything. While there are no hard limits to what is posted here, all of the rules still apply about not starting flame wars etc. Threads in this section the forum may be subject to stricter cleanup actions than other sections. #
    5. Member blogs.
      Members can run their own blogs and should be relating to Atari's or retro computing in some way. #
    6. Forum etiquette.
      Any general spam posts, users will be deleted and banned.
      Topics such as bashing Atari and "Amiga is better" etc will get posts deleted and a temp ban.
      Users who start flame wars will get a temp ban and posts deleted.
      Arguing with members is not tolerated and will get you a temp ban.
      If you don't like a project, then we don't need to know about it.
      Any general negativity towards members or projects will result in a ban. #
    7. Keep It Clean.
      Forums are supposed to be friendly places and we would like to keep it that way. Anyone found abusing other members in any way shape or form will obtain a temporary ban leading to a permanent ban if it persists. #
    8. Use the Report Post option.
      The (i) icon on any post is there to bring any problematic posts immediately to the moderators attention. For example if it seems like somebody is abusing you in some way, please do not respond to the post directly, instead, report it to a moderator to investigate and take appropriate action. Clicking the (i) icon and writing a brief message is all it takes! We are here to help all our forum members in any way we can. So please report problems directly to us and do not try and resolve them yourself. #
    9. Discussions.
      While some discussion is allowed for some topics, the forum intention is to provide help and support for various hardware and softwares which are listed within. If you want to open up a discussion thread on something, please make sure you have some facts and figures of your own personal work on the subject and all related information posted. The forum isn't the place for guesswork,speculation or hearsay by 3rd parties. #
    10. New users
      Your first posts need to be approved by a moderator. I would suggest posting in the introduce yourself thread for starters. We do not operate on the "3 post rule" here, where 3 posts and your automatically a full member. You will not be made a full member until all moderators are in agreement to do so. We only make a few full members each week regardless of if you posted 5 times or 50 times. Should your post be declined, there will be a reason given as to why. Please don't take offence to this, not every post is suitable or relevant to the form. #
    11. Topic clean up & removal.
      From time to time there may be posts or topics which will get removed or condensed into another subject or moved to another area on the forum. This is to maintain order and reduce overall forum clutter. Posts may be corrected in general, for spelling mistakes and typos or removed if they are in violation of any forum rules, but not limited to. #
    12. File attachments
      Essential to any forum of course. Though if you are uploading images, as a general rule, please try not to upload images greater than about 800x800px. We likely don't need super high resolutions for general posts. Its not a violation to upload larger images, its more keeping the file sizes to something sensible. Mostly 200k is considered "large" for a jpg file. While there is no hard rule to say 200K is the limit, I would appreciate not uploading images which are several MB in size for example, unless absolutely required. Most digicams can chuck out 10MB-20MB files easily at high resolutions, simply resizing them to 800px will normally reduce the file size to something sensible also.

      Also jpeg compression can get file sizes down. A lot of the images on my site use 40% setting (jpg normally is set to default at 90%). Also please don't stick to 40% all the time, if image quality suffers, then please do use 90%. There is no use uploading images which are hard to read or awful quality either. So please use your best judgement on quality and compression :)

      We do have a lot of space on the server, but it is not unlimited. So please bare this in mind and try to keep files to a sensible size :)

      Please do not link to external hosting sites with images or files (unless they are HUGE files). Problem with external hosts, they tend to vanish, or files get removed over time, this will cause lots of images on the forum to be "broken" over time. So please upload content to the site where possible. #
    13. Terms - Content
      When you publish content or information on exxos forum, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people outside of exxos forum, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you. exxos forum and/or any related moderators or hosting companies accept no responsibility of information appearing anywhere on the web outside of exxos forum. You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any content that you post on or in connection with exxos forum .

      You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-orientated or any other material that may violate any laws be it of your country, the country where “exxos Atari Forum” is hosted or International Law. Doing so may lead to you being immediately and permanently banned, with notification of your Internet Service Provider if deemed required by us. The IP address of all posts are recorded to aid in enforcing these conditions. You agree that “exxos Atari Forum” have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic at any time should we see fit. #
    14. Don't harass developers.
      Day to day progress of developments of various hardware developers is always posted in the relevant threads on the forum. Threads are generally WIP (Work in progress) and bugging developers as to when this or that will be on sale is generally irritating. WE DO NOT KNOW! Stuff is done when its done. Be it 5 days to 5 years to never. Development takes a lot of time and effort and , DEVELOPMENT! is exactly that, who knows what issues there will or wont be or how long it will take ? Do you have a crystal ball to predict the future ? we sure don't! So if you want to follow the DEVELOPMENT read the threads daily and see what the status of each project is. There will be plenty of announcements when things go on sale, so read the threads! Don't lecture us on how much stuff should or should not cost either. Most developers make a loss on doing all this stuff, so trying to get stuff cheaper will get you banned. #
    15. Troubleshooting Etiquette
      Experts on this forum come in many shapes and sizes, but have a couple of things in common. Firstly, they are dedicated to keeping the Atari ST in its many forms (and other machines) alive and kicking. Secondly, they do what they do voluntarily. Please bear this in mind when requesting help on this forum, and understand that you will be expected to have followed the rules stated below:

      1. Please ensure you are polite and respectful at all times during all troubleshooting requests.
      2. A little self help goes a long way. If you are expecting to be spoon fed answers, you are in the wrong place, as you will be expected to post details and photos in answer to questions in order to help with your problem. Please read and understand all of the basic troubleshooting guides and apply them before requesting more detailed help, and that you have as a bare minimum a multi-meter available to carry out testing.
      3. All troubleshooting topics/posts must be kept within the forum and should not extend to the PM system. This is to ensure any forum user can benefit from the detail contained within them.
      4. If you resolve your problem, please make sure you fully document what you did so that others may benefit from your findings.
      5. We are not here to judge. If you have soldered something, and you think that may be a problem, say so, as we cannot help if we don't know the full picture. Taking offence at the possibility of your soldering being the problem will not help you, but honesty will.
      6. If you have problem with a specific product, remember that it has been thoroughly tested by the designer, and berating them for making a shoddy product that may have problems as a result of your own build process will probably result in a ban.
      7. Ensure that any photos you use are not linked to external sites, but uploaded to the forum and added inline with a description of what it shows.
      8. If you decide enough is enough, please do not simply give up and walk away. If you walk away, so will we. Please make a statement in your post as to the reasons, we may still be able to help in some way.
      9. Do not open multiple posts on the same topic. This wastes valuable time and may result in a ban if the moderators feel you are abusing the forum #