keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-05-06, 15:38:

It’s not at all unreasonable for an internet forum to be hostile to AI generated posts. The entire point of Internet forums is that they are a human social setting. We want to feel like we’re in a room with a bunch of other human beings, talking about our computers, not wondering whether you’re talking to the guy or just talking to his computer directly.

Exactly. I don't know why this is so controversial. Replying "I asked AI your question, and this is what it came up with" to me is a low effort post similar to replying with a suggestion that the OP google it. And like you say, engaging in a discussion with AI-written posts is like going to dinner and everyone else stares at their phones the entire time.

Snover wrote on 2026-05-06, 07:50:

Nexxen wrote on 2026-05-05, 22:44:

In another thread a user offered paid-for services to solve a user's problem. […]

Thanks for the detail. I certainly understand why this seems inconsistent. There was never any internal policy discussion about it one way or the other as far as I can see, so what happened there was some ad hoc decision-making. It is a decision which fits with the overall approach of only intervening to restrict a class of activity when it is systematically problematic, but it seems like this was not communicated clearly, and what did get communicated was mixed with one personal opinion about compensation.

As much as I personally find that ‘beg bounty’ kind of behaviour viscerally repugnant, my feelings are derived from my personal values. Not everyone shares those, and that’s OK. I feel it would be a misuse of my power and a failure of leadership if I were to maraud around prohibiting conduct and making rule changes just because I found something personally upsetting. VOGONS is a community of people who are mostly not me, after all. There may be some case to be made that this sort of conduct does do harm to community—I’m sure game theorists would have some ideas—but whether or not this rises to the level of a pattern of problem behaviour that needs a formal rule clarification, as opposed to just an occasional thing which warrants informal social disapproval from others in the community, really depends on how disruptive it is when it happens, and whether it is happening with regularity. These are facts I do not know, but I will keep this in my mind for future rule updates.

It's actually simpler than that.
In almost all jurisdictions selling/buying goods or services are regulated as the same.
It's not goods or services but selling/buying the important bit, if here it's not allowed for goods than it shouldn't be for services.

When money comes into the equation and something goes wrong things get ugly.
An update would be welcome to clarify things.
Thanks for answering, very much appreciated!!

Nexxen wrote on 2026-05-07, 00:19:

It's actually simpler than that.
In almost all jurisdictions selling/buying goods or services are regulated as the same.
It's not goods or services but selling/buying the important bit, if here it's not allowed for goods than it shouldn't be for services.

My 2c, a forum doesn't need to follow the regulatory framework of state level jurisdictions which have classifications that encompass significantly more effects (e.g. taxation). If product trading is causing issues for the forum and people offering services isn't, it's perfectly reasonable to have a distinction. In the case where someone joins the forum purely to promote their paid services they would be moderated under rule #1 in the first post. That leaves a quadrant of allowed activity that is users with a vested interest in being part of the community offering services (e.g. repair, diagnosis, design etc) to other users which the moderators are not getting any heat for currently and don't see the need to moderate.

Nexxen wrote on 2026-05-07, 00:19:

It's actually simpler than that.
In almost all jurisdictions selling/buying goods or services are regulated as the same.
It's not goods or services but selling/buying the important bit, if here it's not allowed for goods than it shouldn't be for services.

No, please read what I am saying. Regulations aren’t relevant to whether a class of activity has been systematically problematic on VOGONS. Regulators don’t care if people run auctions, or promote YouTube channels, or write comments with LLMs, or behave badly to each other, but we do here, because these things were problems here. The ‘marketplace rule’ is a response to a problem that happened here. We make rules about things which are problematic for here, not according to what someone else decided somewhere else. The rules are written to ensure that VOGONS can continue to serve its purpose, and they exist only to the extent that they must exist, and no more. So which forms of commerce the ‘marketplace rule’ covers are dictated by whether or not they have caused problems here, or whether it seems very likely that they are about to. Does this make sense now?

vvbee wrote on 2026-05-06, 15:01:

There are various approaches to AI. HN's has similarities but use more neutral language, which makes it easier to change course if needed. I don't know how their admin describes the rule's motivations, but you used some colorful language about AI users before editing it down, and one user is posting in this thread with a signature equating AI use to fascism. Freedom of expression even if it might not reflect well on the person, but the idea that Vogons is hostile to AI doesn't seem groundless. Feel free to correct if that's not the intent.

It seems to me as if the vast majorty of us here despises the dystopian hellscape directly enabled by “AI” descending upon us.

(Almost) nobody is saying that it cannot be used as a tool in very specific, focused and applied use cases to save time and effort. Unfortunately, that application of “AI” is absolutely, totally not how the vast majority sees and uses it. It is, however, the barrel of a weapon pointing at society.

“AI” is indeed a tool of fascism, if you stop and think about it. It makes it possible to parse unfathomably large sets of mostly useless individual stolen data points we all generate for somebody else all the time in the digital ecosystem. It is already being done. The machine that will make fascism possible has already mostly been built. ”Trust” in and aquiescence of the evildoers wielding power in this world, it is a mistake we as a collective are already paying dearly for and it will only get worse.

I agree that it is rude to give people generated replies on an internet forum setting. If I wanted that confidently wrong expression in the form of a heap of generated tokens, I would let such a thing generate it for myself, and I think I am far from alone in this sentiment.

The opinions expressed about such things are clear and strong, sure. Even satirical and funny. (Yes, “grunting in LLM” is a hilarious statement of parody on an envisioned dystopian future, of which the writing is already on the wall.) That is a good thing. None of it is as far as I can see out of line, being ad hominem or harassing or anything such. Nobody is calling any specific person a “insert your favourite slur” here, which is also good. That is not the intention.

I do not see anything wrong with the new rule. There is nothing vague and hidden about it. Our collective sentiment about the thing it forbids is also no secret.

The rule does not prohibit valid applications of LLM’s.

Snover wrote on 2026-05-02, 18:19:

#1: You won’t use VOGONS to promote social media channels.

VOGONS is a community, not a promotional marketing service for content creators. Over the past year or so, there’s been a noticeable uptick in accounts that are posting to promote their social media channels (usually YouTube). This is now prohibited.

As with the existing restriction on auction promotion, this rule is intended to discourage spammer-like activity from people who are not actually interested in being part of the community. As such, please use your best judgement when reporting this kind of post. For example: did an established community member do something cool and posted a link to their video about it here? Great, watch and discuss! On the other hand, is an account mostly only posting about their YouTube or TikTok or YouTok or TikTube videos and not really engaging with other community content? This is the sort of unwanted behaviour this rule aims to prevent.

I know I rarely post much on the VOGONS forums anymore, save for whenever I get a new ADG video out, but I do want to mention a couple things in response to this new rule.

In terms of the thread I've had going here on the forums since 2010 related to my Ancient DOS Games videos, I've been keeping that thread going mostly out of a sense of duty, as this was one of the communities which helped get me my initial push into making videos back in 2010, and so despite my attention being pulled away I still make an effort to post about what I'm up to and reply to feedback. Reciprocally, every once in awhile someone comments on one of my videos on YouTube asking questions I don't have answers to, but which are the kinds of things everyone here at VOGONS understands, so I direct them here to these forums.

The thing I am weary about is that I am reminded of a moment back in 2008 when I was trying to broaden my scope into the retro-gaming community at that time and a different forum kicked me out the INSTANT I had joined and posted a reply about something I had information about, not because of what I had posted, but because I had the gall to put my website address in my signature. (Yes, I was told this by the moderator.)

It is EXCEPTIONALLY difficult as an independent creator to create something and get feedback anymore because many gaming communities outside of social media are locked down something fierce when it comes to anything even remotely promotional, and of course, everything else is overshadowed by the mega-popular or corporate entities who can afford many thousands to millions of dollars in traditional advertising.

I find this new rule, as it is written, is ambiguous. There needs to be a clearer definition of what kind of behaviour is allowed and what is not because that is what will define VOGONS going forwards in terms of how people interact with the site. The way the rule is written, despite everything I have said, I don't actually know if I am still allowed to keep my ADG thread going or not.

Hi,

I have joined this community recently, but this topic seem to have exploded, so I think I give my own opinion on this.

It seems to me that much of the discussion is about what is in the 7th rule of the everything else category of the terms of use.

In my perspective the discussion and arguments about that rule happens because unlike every other rule in the terms of use that one is ambiguous as written. It might be not ambiguous the way it is actually enforced, but if I were a content creator on a site that might be considered social media, I'm currently not, but I sometimes do think about starting a Youtube channel about how programming were done in the 90s, and then I would be wary of posting links to my content due to this ambiguity even though it might be useful/interesting for members of this community.

Anyhow I made this post as I saw that mostly long time members of this community makes posts in this topic and the perspective of a newly joined member might be useful. I will still be a member of this community if this rule stays the same way as it is written now, but I will not post links to content authored by me if it can be in any way considered to be social media just stay on the safe side.

Gemini000 wrote on 2026-05-07, 15:08:

The thing I am weary about is that I am reminded of a moment back in 2008 when I was trying to broaden my scope into the retro-gaming community at that time and a different forum kicked me out the INSTANT I had joined and posted a reply about something I had information about, not because of what I had posted, but because I had the gall to put my website address in my signature. (Yes, I was told this by the moderator.)

I understand that there is a broad cultural belief that those who break the rules ‘must be punished’. I reject this idea completely. My overwhelming experience, both in life and in managing community, is that punishing individuals for making mistakes or losing emotional control is harmful to everyone. It harms the person who made the mistake. It harms the relationship between that person and the moderators. It harms the community. So, to the best of our ability as fallible human moderators, we don’t do that here. For anyone to be banned from VOGONS is exceptionally rare, and people are allowed to return if they agree to start following the rules.

That you still harbour a sense of fear from an event that happened almost twenty years ago speaks to the exact sort of long-lasting personal harm caused by adversarial, punitive, and retributive responses to perceived harms and misdeeds. Did that moderator consider the consequences of their actions on the other? It seems unlikely. Probably they were only thinking about themselves and how good it felt to wield righteous power. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about the emotional shell shock, other than to try to model a better way.

It is EXCEPTIONALLY difficult as an independent creator to create something and get feedback anymore because many gaming communities outside of social media are locked down something fierce when it comes to anything even remotely promotional, and of course, everything else is overshadowed by the mega-popular or corporate entities who can afford many thousands to millions of dollars in traditional advertising.

While I commiserate over the loss of the short golden age of online indie media, it does not change the fact that it is not the goal of VOGONS to be a marketing channel—not for big corpos, not for small indies, not for anyone. If the market for this kind of content is so oversaturated, and regulators are so captured, that it’s not commercially viable for indies any more, that doesn’t mean that VOGONS becomes fair game to be colonised and exploited. I am genuinely sorry if this is personally upsetting or feels like a threat to your or anyone’s livelihood. It is not my intent to harm anyone with these changes. But VOGONS cannot be a sanctuary from the attention economy and also allow activity that only exists due to the incentives of the attention economy.

I don't actually know if I am still allowed to keep my ADG thread going or not.

Based on your recent posting history, it seems that the only thing that you are doing here now is posting to the videos, and that is indeed the sort of conduct that we are trying to discourage with this change. If the other discussions on the forum do not interest you, then probably VOGONS just isn’t the right fit any more for what you are doing in your life right now, and that’s OK. If that changes, I hope that you will come back and enjoy having conversations started by other people about things other than your videos in future.

You're a good dude, Snover. You should apply to be a mod or something!

EDIT: heh my attempt at humor doesn't contribute much so I feel the need to edit, behind the joke I really do appreciate the time you spent in here trying to explain the rationale behind the new rules and I still think they make all kind of sense, without the need to cherry-pick every single edge case. Yet you did take time to discuss every edge case that was brought up.

The way I see it, this is a sanctuary for old farts, sharing a common passion for "old tech" (wide brush assumed). This feels like the good old internet that I grew up with and miss so much. No need to debate about AI forever, what it boils down to is "speak and interact as a person". No need to deep-dive into the subject, AI being shit and hallucinating about retro stuff (as it's the topic here), just don't copy and paste AI answers as the core substance of your messages and nobody will bat an eye if you build your message around AI stuff (potential quick humorous jab excepted). Don't use VOGONS as your personal promotion website for whatever you're doing. You're involved in the community? Fair game, nobody will bat an eye if you post your latest video or article if it's relevant to the community and content. What's hard to grasp? Mods aren't saying that you'll be banned on sight if any tidbit of AI or self-promotion transpires from some of your post. Those rules are just a failsafe to something that is unfortunately growing and polluting many communities. In the end, it all boils down to the smallest common denominator of all communities - don't be an ass and everything will be fine.

RE-EDIT: I realize now that old farts was unnecessarily reductive. Young farts welcome. It's all about the spirit! 😁

Snover wrote on 2026-05-07, 18:36:

I understand that there is a broad cultural belief that those who break the rules ‘must be punished’. I reject this idea complet […]
Show full quote

Gemini000 wrote on 2026-05-07, 15:08:

The thing I am weary about is that I am reminded of a moment back in 2008 when I was trying to broaden my scope into the retro-gaming community at that time and a different forum kicked me out the INSTANT I had joined and posted a reply about something I had information about, not because of what I had posted, but because I had the gall to put my website address in my signature. (Yes, I was told this by the moderator.)

I understand that there is a broad cultural belief that those who break the rules ‘must be punished’. I reject this idea completely. My overwhelming experience, both in life and in managing community, is that punishing individuals for making mistakes or losing emotional control is harmful to everyone. It harms the person who made the mistake. It harms the relationship between that person and the moderators. It harms the community. So, to the best of our ability as fallible human moderators, we don’t do that here. For anyone to be banned from VOGONS is exceptionally rare, and people are allowed to return if they agree to start following the rules.

That you still harbour a sense of fear from an event that happened almost twenty years ago speaks to the exact sort of long-lasting personal harm caused by adversarial, punitive, and retributive responses to perceived harms and misdeeds. Did that moderator consider the consequences of their actions on the other? It seems unlikely. Probably they were only thinking about themselves and how good it felt to wield righteous power. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about the emotional shell shock, other than to try to model a better way.

It is EXCEPTIONALLY difficult as an independent creator to create something and get feedback anymore because many gaming communities outside of social media are locked down something fierce when it comes to anything even remotely promotional, and of course, everything else is overshadowed by the mega-popular or corporate entities who can afford many thousands to millions of dollars in traditional advertising.

While I commiserate over the loss of the short golden age of online indie media, it does not change the fact that it is not the goal of VOGONS to be a marketing channel—not for big corpos, not for small indies, not for anyone. If the market for this kind of content is so oversaturated, and regulators are so captured, that it’s not commercially viable for indies any more, that doesn’t mean that VOGONS becomes fair game to be colonised and exploited. I am genuinely sorry if this is personally upsetting or feels like a threat to your or anyone’s livelihood. It is not my intent to harm anyone with these changes. But VOGONS cannot be a sanctuary from the attention economy and also allow activity that only exists due to the incentives of the attention economy.

I don't actually know if I am still allowed to keep my ADG thread going or not.

Based on your recent posting history, it seems that the only thing that you are doing here now is posting to the videos, and that is indeed the sort of conduct that we are trying to discourage with this change. If the other discussions on the forum do not interest you, then probably VOGONS just isn’t the right fit any more for what you are doing in your life right now, and that’s OK. If that changes, I hope that you will come back and enjoy having conversations started by other people about things other than your videos in future.

Just wanted to chime in and say that I really appreciate the new rules and the way you are taking the time to elaborate on them.

This stance on self promotion is also exactly what makes sense for a community like this. There are several members that have youtube channels but most of their time here is spent conversing like anyone else, rather than promoting their videos.

Any time I see posts or threads that are promoting videos\websites with no effort really being made to contribute to any discussion on VOGONS it does stand out as being kind of "meh", and it has nothing to do with the quality of the videos or the value of what the person is doing on youtube. It is simply out of place here. If even 10% of the people that had a retro computing or retro gaming oriented youtube channel posted their videos here, then any actual discussions would be lost in a see of "Check it out! I just did ___! *link* " posts. That said, if someone actively contributes to discussions, helps to solve problems or makes threads\posts that actually go into detail about what they are doing, I don't see any issue with a link to their channel in their signature, or even a link to a video when it is actually relevant to a discussion.

For me, part of why message boards like this are such a breath of fresh air compared to more "modern" sites like Reddit or other types of social media is that they facilitate discussions and problem solving in actual, proper chronological order (you know, like a real conversation) so that someone can see the beginning, progression and end result or solution. If no such thing is needed, as is the case with "Watch this video!" posts, then there is really no reason for those to be here. They can just as easily go to Reddit or something similar where the entire platform is based around getting exposure, promotion and votes, with an endless feedback loop and no clear order or resolution to most "conversations".

With that in mind, it should also be clear why I agree that AI fluff also doesn't have any real place here. It is replacing steps in the conversation with walls of text that have little or no thought behind them and may be flat out wrong or partially harvested from other posts in the exact same discussion. One person saving time by copying and pasting output from AI is choosing to possibly waste the time of everyone who ever reads that post since the content may or may not be of any value at all without further research.

When it comes to deciding if a post breaks new rule #1, here's what I would propose: if the post in question didn't contain the video link, does it still contain any relevant information? If the answer is no, it doesn't deserve to be posted on the forum.
It's not just a question of spamming/advertising, there's also the problem of outside content "going away" and if a post is based solely around a video that ceases to exist, the post is worthless.

As I recall the problem with the old ebay thread was that it had heavy traffic and was for a time the busiest thread on the forum. This was causing annoyance for people who landed on the forum, clicked "active topics", and got served a bunch of auction spam they weren't interested in.

You could potentially create a new thread for people to advertise their social media activities but mitigate this problem by not having it appear when "active topics" is clicked. I assume the forum software allows for this.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-05-07, 20:53:

With that in mind, it should also be clear why I agree that AI fluff also doesn't have any real place here. It is replacing steps in the conversation with walls of text that have little or no thought behind them and may be flat out wrong or partially harvested from other posts in the exact same discussion. One person saving time by copying and pasting output from AI is choosing to possibly waste the time of everyone who ever reads that post since the content may or may not be of any value at all without further research.

LLMs and "Generative AI" (which isn't even really "AI" in the first place, we're nowhere close to "General Artificial Intelligence" which is arguably MORE DANGEROUS) have started a epidemic trend of laziness in a lot of tech/online people and despite all the studies and papers being written up on the subject I don't see it stopping any day soon unfortunately...

I'll never understand even AFTER reading up on these various studies how people end up just... adopting these wasteful pieces of software as if they're the "holy grail" to absolutely everything, absolutely trustworthy absolutely infallible, despite evidence to the contrary. People are rapidly losing their cognition skills both as a result of these "AI tech bro" companies constantly pushing this nonsense into everyones faces non stop, and failing government institutions.

If people cannot maintain the cognitive ability to actually think long and hard about what they want to say and write, I really do not think they should be active on the internet much less forums I regular on for proper discussion and advice on incredibly niche subjects that already suffer enough from misinformation/disinformation problems.

Interesting thread - hers's my thoughts.

100% agreement on "no AI"
In my experience AI "slop" frequently get posted by those who really want to pretend to be "unknown drips under pressure"* in regards to a subject in which they know so little about that they are incapable of realising their "response"s are often laughable
*("X"marks the unknown, "spurt"is a drip under pressure - figure it out)

99.99% agreed on promoting social media.

90% agreed on buying/selling goods or services.

In these cases, I think the important thought is "reasonable".
This is VOGONS, not VAPMF "Very Agreesive Personal Marketing Forums".

I do think it reasonable to put a bit about who you are and what you do in your sig.
If you run a SM channel, putting your and it's name in sig seems OK (at least to me).
If you run a business in vintage related hw/sw/services, names in sig seems OK.

The ONLY times I could see (somewhat) reasonanle use inside posts:

Q: I'm looking for xxx and can't find one anywhere.
R: I have an xxx I'm no longer using, PM me so we can discuss.

Q: I'm trying to fix yyy
R: You need to do zzz - More details about this on: <channel>

Note the lack of promotion and lengthy discussion "in public".

----
I have to confess to "bending" these ideas in the early days.
I'm a fairly atypical user. I've always enjoyed creating technical stuff, designing and building hardware, writing software etc.

Because of this I built my own systems long before the PC was a thing, even designed my own CPU at one point. Almost never had a "prebuilt" system, and rarely use "other" software!

I've written almost all the software that I use Operating systems*1, editors, languages (interpreters and compilers), file/system management tools, Information/file transfer ...
I could go on .. it's a long list!

I ran my own company (DDS) and made a pretty good living selling this stuff!
(*1 I mostly use Win/Dos/Linux postPC - just so I can make stuff others can use)

Now that I'm retired I give as much of it away as I can (see Downloads and "40+ years worth of source code") on my site.

And yeah... When I see someone looking for a tool or other solution to a problem I had solved along the way, I tend to aggressively point them at "what I know works" (at least for me)
- I am trying to get better!

I think there should be a "grandfather clause" for threads like the Ancient DOS Game Webshow.
They have demonstrated for years (almost decades) that they have good intentions and applying the new rules feels like trying to add ABS and airbags to a '63 Mustang...
Some may cry foul but I think it is an easy exception to make..