If you wish to sign up for a forum account, you are to follow the rules listed here.

Keep to the correct category

Please respect the rules in each forum category, which can be located in the about <category> sticky topics at the top of each category. Please remember that mis-categorizing a topic is fine and is never a crime; if you are uncertain, you may either put it where you feel it most appropriate and a moderator or administrator will move it to the appropriate place, you can ask about it in Site Feedback, or you can send a DM to a moderator or administrator to ask. The staff are always willing to help you figure out where to put your topic (or to make a new place if there happens to not be a place that fits at all).

Basic respect in a coding context

People will join this forum ranging from inexperienced developers to those who have released many popular audio game titles. Any experienced developer who makes a new programmer feel unwelcome by in any way insulting rather than teaching them will be first warned and, if the offense continues, topic locked or silenced. New programmers are here to learn how to do better, not to be laughed at and/or told mockingly that what they are doing is wrong and won't work.
Similarly, any inexperienced programmer who tries hard to pressure or negatively manipulate an experienced developer into helping them rather than kindly asking questions could also be warned or further moderated. Any help here is given freely and voluntarily, and any attempt to make someone feel bad for not being helpful in time will not be tolerated.

Different people have different coding styles and methods. Civil discussion suggestions as to what might be best in a helpful context is OK, but in the end there is to be respect for the different choices of community members and how they wish to write code or create their programs. If someone rejects your advice, do not look down on that person for choosing to code in a way contrary to what you think should be acceptable (people are allowed to have their own projects). Any attempt to harass or negatively criticize someone's coding methods or style will cause the offender to be met with warnings and eventually aggressive moderation action such as topic locks or silencing.

Basic respect in a community context

There may be people here who are all ages, who come from many different backgrounds, who may have religious or political beliefs different from your own, who have varying maturity levels or who may make different choices than what you consider comfortable within your own life. All people are to be welcomed and respected on this forum, and anyone trying to make someone feel unwelcome for any of these reasons may be warned or aggressively moderated.
To this end, swearing or cursing is to be kept to a minimum. A few light choice words here and there won't get anyone in trouble, but obsessive amounts may result in warning or aggressive moderation. Remember that there may be people here much younger or more innocent than yourself. I think we can all be clever enough with words here to not need to resort to such things any more than absolutely needed.

Any insults against someone's religion, sexual orientation, gender, political beliefs, race / ethnicity, age or maturity will not remotely be tolerated here and such things could lead to very quick silencing or suspension. Let people live their own lives! If you believe someone is being immature in a way that effects civil discussion and/or makes you uncomfortable, you should take it up with a moderator instead of engaging with the offender beyond asking them to please stop.
More generally, there is not a reason to insult anybody here or to act uncivil in any way! Though the above points are sensitive enough to deserve their own mentions, this does not mean that other forms of insult or disrespect are any more OK. If you can't treat others the way you would want to be treated, you probably don't belong here and could find yourself warned or aggressively moderated upon continued offense against any person or group for any reason. Civil disagreements and light debates may be OK, but if any conversation leads to heated words or disrespectful messages, that conversation is to cease immediately!

Spam and unwelcome content

As we all know, spam is any form of content flooding, such as by sending many posts very quickly, creating many pointless topics to make actual content difficult to find, or any other form of making this community an unpleasant place to be by flooding it with pointless content. Any attempt to spam, especially by circumventing or skirting the automatic limitations put in place, will result in immediate aggressive moderation, likely without a warning as spammers usually know they are spamming and thus don't need to be warned/told about it first.

Any malware, trogen, virus or offensive computer program you post will result in an instant and permanent suspension of your account.

Also, there are to be no discussions, example games or any other forms of engagement revolving around adult sexual topics or activities here! Think carefully about whether the thing you are about to post could be compromising to the innocents of someone younger than you, and understand that you will likely be instantly suspended or silenced if you decide to post such a thing anyway.

Account sharing

You shall not attempt to access, utilize, or assume control over any account belonging to another user of the forum under any circumstances unless you can prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you had no control over the loss of your account credentials. You shall be responsible for all activity conducted using your account, with very few exceptions. One such exception to this condition applies to unified accounts.
Should you desire that your account be designated as a unified account, particularly in instances involving collaborative entities such as developer teams, and should you wish to confer access privileges to said account upon third parties, then and only then, the following conditions and stipulations shall be rigorously observed and adhered to:

1. You shall irrevocably acknowledge and affirm that any and all activities, actions, or omissions executed under the unified account shall be attributed to, and be deemed representative of, the collective assemblage of all individuals granted access to such account. The unified account shall serve as a comprehensive embodiment of all such individuals who are vested with access privileges thereto.
2. You shall procure explicit authorization from the forum administrators for each individual to whom access to the unified account is to be granted. Furthermore, you shall bear the responsibility to promptly apprise the forum administrators of any and all instances of the conferral of new access privileges to additional individuals.
3. In the event of the suspension of the unified account, there exists a possibility depending on the circumstances that all individuals possessing access privileges to said account shall concurrently be subject to suspension. In the event of a concurrent suspension, no such individuals shall establish alternative accounts with the intent or purpose of evading the imposed suspension under any circumstances whatsoever. The forum administrators may take any and all actions necessary to prevent the evasion of the imposed suspension if such evasion is determined to have occurred, and any attempt to evade such suspension shall result in the suspension becoming permanent and irrevocable.

Licensing of code, code samples, and other material

Should you post source code, a code sample, a demo or example, or any similar material (hereinafter the "source code"), you must either:

• Agree that the code is licensed under The Unlicense; or
• explicitly denote the license that the source code is released under in the original post or topic title where the source code is located.

Should you not explicitly denote the license for the source code, it shall be assumed to be licensed under The Unlicense, and no further action need be taken by you.

The above does not apply if you post links to source code that exists on external websites with other terms. For example, a repository on Github with no license is completely copyrighted and allows for no shared usage, posting a link to such a repository on this forum does not, of course, change those terms. This rules section has the intention that if a user finds a few lines of code in a post, they don't need to question whether they can use it in their projects.

Updates

These rules/terms may be updated at any time. Though the following will not apply until the beginning of 2025 so that we can have time to finish setting up this forum rapidly, A prominent notice will appear on all forum pages for several days following any significant changes to these terms.