The one-paragraph summary

Post useful stuff, be decent to the people you're talking to, and remember that the retro community runs on enthusiasm and voluntary labour. If you wouldn't say it to someone at a swap meet, don't post it here. If you wouldn't upload it from a logged-in account with your real name, don't upload it here either.

What's welcome

• Questions from absolute beginners. Everyone started somewhere.
• Hardware threads — repairs, recapping, acquisitions, finds-in-the-wild, disasters.
• Code, schematics, disassemblies, and notes from your own work.
• Homebrew game releases. Announce them in the right forum and link the source if it's open.
• Preservation work. Dumps, scans, captures, archival efforts.
• For-sale / wanted posts in the marketplace forums, following the marketplace rules posted there.
• BBS promotion in BBS-related forums, respectfully.
• Opinions on hardware, games, and the endless "which is better" arguments. Strong takes are fine if you can back them up.
• Off-topic conversation in the General Discussion section, within reason.

What's not welcome

• Harassment. No personal attacks, no slurs, no piling on. Disagree with the idea; don't character-assassinate the person.
• Doxxing. Don't post someone's real name, address, phone number, employer, family members, or other private identifiers without their consent. Linking to where that info lives on another site counts the same way.
• Threats. Including jokey ones. We don't try to parse intent.
• Sexually explicit content. This site isn't for it. There's no "NSFW tag" that makes it OK here.
• Anything involving minors sexually. Permanent ban and a report to authorities. No appeals.
• Malware and phishing. Don't upload it. Don't link to it. Don't ask someone else to do it for you. Warez packaged with a bonus payload is malware.
• Pirated commercial software you don't own. Retro-community convention has drifted on this, but from our side: unlicensed commercial ROMs and cracks are not allowed on the File Exchange. Your own backups of software you own are fine for personal reference; distributing them isn't.
• Impersonation. Don't pretend to be someone you're not — another member, a developer, an employee, a celebrity.
• Spam. Bulk posting the same thing, low-effort link-farms, repetitive self-promotion, SEO stuffing.
• Off-topic flame wars in on-topic forums. Take political fights, culture-war arguments, and personal drama out of the technical forums.
• Ban evasion. If you were banned, don't come back under a new account. We'll notice.
• Vote manipulation. Don't organize brigades, don't run sock-puppet accounts to upvote your own content.

Posting etiquette

• Search before you post. Chances are the question's been answered. Link to the thread instead of starting a new one.
• Use descriptive titles. "Help!" is useless. "1541 won't read disks — red light stays solid" tells future searchers what they're walking into.
• One topic per thread. Makes it findable, makes answers easier.
• Post in the right forum. Mods will move it if it lands in the wrong place, but putting it in the right spot saves everyone time.
• Don't bump threads. If you have something new to add, add it. If you're just trying to move your thread up the list, don't.
• Quote sparingly. Quoting a whole post to add "agreed" is noise.
• Spoilers on game plots and similar — use the spoiler syntax if you've got it, or at least flag it in the title.
• Credit sources. If you're quoting someone else's blog, scan, video, or forum post, say so and link back.

Buying, selling, and trading

• Only post sales in the marketplace forums. The rest of the site isn't a sales channel.
• Describe the item honestly. Condition, known issues, tested / untested.
• Price it in public. "PM for price" threads get locked.
• Transactions happen off-site. We don't hold escrow and we can't get your money back. Use a payment method with buyer protection.
• Trade feedback lives in the Trade Feedback forum. Use it — it protects the next buyer.

Uploads to the File Exchange

• Describe what it is, where it's from, and what it needs to run.
• Include versions or dates where relevant.
• Scans of manuals and magazines are welcome if you scanned them or if the publisher has released them, or if the publisher is long gone and no rights-holder has surfaced to claim them.
• Commercial ROMs belong to their publishers. Don't upload them.
• If in doubt, ask a moderator in the relevant forum before uploading.
• Every upload goes through a moderation queue before it goes public. Expect a short delay.

How moderation works here

The site has several roles:

• Moderators — volunteer members who handle a specific forum or category. They can warn, lock threads, move posts, and temporarily suspend members for clear rule-breaking inside their area.
• Super Moderators — cover whole categories. Same tools, broader remit.
• Administrators — can manage user accounts, issue site-wide suspensions, and adjust moderators. Cannot change the site's rules unilaterally.
• Super Admins (Sysops) — site operators. Every action a mod or admin takes is logged and visible to Sysops.

Enforcement ladder. For most issues we go in escalating steps:

1. Informal nudge or a thread edit (for first-offence posting etiquette stuff).
2. Formal warning, logged against your account.
3. Temporary suspension — typically 24 hours to 7 days depending on what happened.
4. Shadow-ban if we think you're a spam account or a ban-evader (your posts become invisible to everyone else).
5. Permanent ban.

Some things skip the ladder and go straight to ban — sexual content involving minors, credible threats of violence, malware uploads, doxxing. Those don't get warnings.

Reporting something

Every post has a report button. Use it instead of replying in the thread to complain — the thread noise doesn't help, and a report goes directly to the moderator team for the relevant forum.

When you report, tell us what rule you think was broken and give the mod enough context to decide quickly. "This is a copy-paste of a manual I scanned and published" tells us what to do. "This person is wrong" doesn't.

For DMCA / copyright complaints, use dmca@6502ish.com — see §8 of the Terms of Service for what we need in a valid notice.

Appeals

If you're suspended or banned and think the call was wrong, you'll see an appeal form on the suspended / banned page. Appeals are read by the Sysops. Mods don't review their own decisions; an uninvolved admin handles it. We read every appeal, but we don't guarantee a response time and we're not obligated to reverse a decision.

Appeals we won't entertain: bans for CSAM, credible threats, malware uploads, or doxxing. Those are terminal.

Transparency

• Every mod and admin action is logged in the audit log. Sysops review the log regularly.
• The mod log for each forum is visible to that forum's mod team and the Sysops.
• If we make a site-wide change to how moderation works, we post it in Important Alerts.

How these Guidelines change

These Guidelines evolve with the community. Material changes are announced in Important Alerts. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent change.

Contact

Questions about these Guidelines, or if something isn't covered here: support@6502ish.com.