About
Retrogameboards.com: where boards are retro, the conversation is fresh, and the video games are timeless.
Retrogameboards.com is ad-free, has open registration and is free to use for everyone. We have no plans to change this and hope to keep it this way, permanently.
Retrogameboards.com is owned by a Delaware charitable corporation whose 501©(3) status is pending, called Retro Game Boards Inc. The directors of this entity are the moderators of our website (BTails, D.Lo, Peagles, and Socksfelloff) and Peltz sits as the President and CEO.
Our charity’s purpose is to solicit donations to (1) keep our forum online, and (2) provide arcade machines, consoles, and video games to children’s hospitals (as well as children’s wings in general hospitals) all over the world.
We will have an ongoing campaign to which you can donate to keep the site alive. All funds we raised in excess of server costs will be used to provide video game hardware and software to children’s hospitals all over the world.
Please visit our Patreon link here to donate.
History
Most of the original members of Retrogameboards.com were regular posters in the retro-themed threads on NeoGAF. For many of us, it was these threads that kept us coming back to that forum.
When that forum imploded on October 22nd 2017, Peagles created a Discord server, and everyone worked together to gather various members of the retro community. Within a few days, most of the original members had been located and invited to the Discord.
On October 26 2017, Peltz created Retrogameboards.com. We’re not the only board that sprang out of NeoGAF, and many articles you’ll find have more information about ResetERA and other communities that sprang up. However, we decided we should have a home where you can post freely about retro and not have to worry about it being instantly buried or told that Sonic was never good, and from there the community has grown and flourished.
On February 16th 2018, the moderation team announced that Retrogameboards.com would be a charitable corporation as outlined above.
Rules and Moderation Policy
This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion
RGB is an all-inclusive place. Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation. So please, be civil.
These are not hard and fast rules, merely guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community and keep this a clean and well-lighted place for civilized public discourse.
Improve the Discussion
Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.
The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.
One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.
Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree
You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:
- Name-calling
- Ad hominem attacks
- Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
- Knee-jerk contradiction
Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.
Your Participation Counts
The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.
Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.
Let’s leave our community better than we found it.
If You See a Problem, Flag It
Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.
When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.
In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.
Always Be Civil
Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:
- Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
- Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
- Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
- Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.
These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.
This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends. Keep it clean folks!
Keep It Tidy
Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:
- Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
- Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
- Don’t post no-content replies.
- Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
- Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.
Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.
Post Only Your Own Stuff
You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.
Bright Line on Piracy
Discussing how to create and play your own backups is okay. Discussing how to access backups made by others is not. The waters are not muddy on this issue.
Emulators and flash cart discussions in general are also okay, because they can be used to play your own backups which is perfectly kosher. Discussing where to find ROMs ripped by others to use with said items is not okay.
The goals of the moderation staff is not to pass judgment or act like we are holier than thou. We don’t have some grand moral agenda we are trying to enforce where everything has to be played exactly as developers intended it back in the day on OG hardware.
We are only trying to moderate the discussion away from being seen as a site which sanctions content that instructs others on how others can pirate software.
If your post contains directions that lead to a site or ripping community that pirates software, your post will be edited so that information is removed.
If you simply say, “this game has been ripped and is on the Internet” without any additional details, it will not be edited because you’re simply commenting that something is out there without giving directions on how to find it.
Naming an organization or website that distributes such software without providing a link is against the rules too, because those still constitute instructions on how to pirate stuff.
In other words, err on the side of not disclosing any unauthorized sources of licensed software. Don’t mention ripping communities and don’t link to archives where licensed software is available without consent of the license holder.
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This site is operated by your friendly local staff and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.