Slight Rule Changes

[Bryce W]

The forum rules have changed slightly so I ask that you please reread them here.

A "No Advertising" rule has been added and the "No Pirate Material" rule has been tweaked.

As for advertising, this won't affect 99.9% of you. You are still allowed to advertise your site in your signature as you have always done. You are also allowed post advertising items that you are unaffiliated with in the Computer Deals forum ("Hey guys, Newegg is selling X for $XX"). You are also still allowed to post recommendation answers ("Hey, whats the best X?" , "X is pretty good") as long as you are not affiliated with it/working with the owner. This helps prevent fake recommendations too. Spammers try this every now and then where they create an account, ask the "what is the best X?" question and then create another account and answer it with their product a few days later.

The reason for this is that we have had to remove some sellers from here since they break the "No Vendors" rule in the Buy/Sell/Trade forum. The problem was that they then just posted it in the other forums to circumvent this rule. While I didn't mind some sellers here, in the interest of treating everyone equally I need to apply the rule to all sellers.

To those very few who have a thread where they are advertising/selling their product, they will obviously not receive any infractions since that wouldn't be fair as the rule didn't exist when they made it. The thread will just be closed.

As for the "No Pirate Material" rule tweak, we previously had it so it just said "No links to Pirate Material". However, there have been a few threads where people were asking for help to make use of pirate material, so we expanded the rule to "No Links to Pirate Material or Assisting with Its Use".

I felt these two rules were needed in order to protect the quality of the forums.