Hardware Insights Forum

Online safety
While forums and other websites can be very useful, you can get into serious trouble if you aren't careful with what you post.
To protect yourself from potential harm, we recommend taking the following precautions:

1. Anything you post could be used against you, especially if it contains a controversial statement.
   Even if you (or we) delete something you posted, there's no way to guarantee that someone else won't have saved a copy in the meantime.
2. Be very careful with personal information. This includes but is not limited to your:
   
   • Real name (you can get away with just your first name if it's something reasonably common, but that's the limit)
   • Identifiable photographs (e.g. if your face or full body is visible)
     When photographing a reflective object (e.g. a hard disk platter), make sure nothing problematic is in the reflections.
   • Home address (if you want to be extra safe, you may also omit your city/town); if you do publish your address (or anything personally identifiable), then announcing when you'll go on vacation is a bad idea as that presents a “green light” for burglars.
   • E-mail address, telephone/fax numbers, or other channels of personal contact
   • Passwords, PINs, encryption keys, or other security credentials (definitely don't publish these!)
   • Date of birth (especially if you're not yet a legal adult; if you want your age to be known, you can set it in your profile)
   • Any school, church, park, local store, or other location you attend regularly
   • The name of any small business you work at
   • Personal experiences which could be taken wrongly by other people
   • Serial numbers of products still under warranty
   • Even the patterns of keys can be copied visually, so if shown in a photo, their blades should be covered up, cropped or blurred out of the picture.
   The same principles apply to the information of anyone you know, and it may also be illegal (and definitely unethical) to publish without their permission.
   Be aware that items which might individually be innocuous, could be pieced together to narrow down your identity; so better to be safe than sorry.
   In general, we don't recommend publishing any of these without a very good reason; if you do post any of them, we won't be responsible for any abuse by other people.
3. If you see any spam posts (made chiefly for the purpose of commercial promotion, against the forum rules), do not follow links therein, as they may well lead to dodgy material (scams, malware, etc.).

Of course, make sure to also read and understand the forum rules.

Although it's not a problem here (and isn't strictly a “safety” thing), we also don't recommend mentioning psychology (or other soft-science) terms in “normie” spaces, as they're pretty much guaranteed to be abused (or at best applied condescendingly) there.

General reminders
Here are some tips that will help us keep the forum clean and organized, making sure people can find the info the fastest and easiest way possible…

1. Search: use the Search function to avoid making a new thread about something that has already been answered.
2. Report: please report any spam or offensive post by clicking the Report button (an exclamation mark on an inverted triangle) under the offending post. This really helps us keep the forum clean.