The Forum Philosophy

[Koroush Ghazi]

The Forum Philosophy explains the rationale behind the rules we have here, and will hopefully help you understand the kind of forum this place is designed to be.


The TweakGuides Philosophy

TweakGuides is run on the basis of providing tech and tweaking information to help you to help yourself. As computers become integral to almost every aspect of our way of life, it is no longer possible to simply ignore them or pretend that it's not important to know how they work. Now more than ever it has become extremely important that you begin to genuinely understand how your PC and its software are working.

Therefore this site specifically tries to provide resources which help people to better understand their computer and the various options available in Windows, in games and in popular applications. By genuinely understanding these options, a user can make the appropriate choices for his or her machine, as there is no 'one size fits all' approach to PC tweaking.

This site and its forums are not devised so that readers come here, switch off their brains, and simply do as they're told, or just ask everyone else to do all their thinking for them. If that is what you're after, then this isn't the place to find it.


The Aim of The TweakGuides Forums

The TweakGuides Forums are designed to be different to other forums. I'm not interested in simply creating 'yet another forum'. Importantly, the forums are not here primarily to serve the tech support needs of TweakGuides readers. First and foremost, the forums are about having a unique environment where Invited Members are shielded from the usual garbage prevalent on other Internet forums; where people can discuss anything ranging from the best graphics card at the moment, to what they do in their spare time, without having to be subjected to the childish, idiotic or abusive comments which permeate so many other online places these days.

This is a tech discussion forum reserved only for mature, intelligent, interesting people from a variety of backgrounds, who have something productive to contribute and who wish to genuinely discuss a topic rather than simply argue with, belittle, outsmart, beg for help from, or annoy other members.


What About Tech Support?

There is a saying which goes:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

There is an endless and ever-increasing demand for free tech support. Everyone wants someone else to solve all their problems for them. This site and these forums are not designed for or resourced to deal with the never-ending influx of people who want unlimited free tech support. The guides on the main site are the main way in which this site provides the free detailed information people need to help themselves, supplemented by readers doing some wider reading and basic research of their own.

More importantly, the voracious demand for free tech support eventually turns any forum into a total mess. I have observed the following things which happen when a forum tries to provide unlimited free tech support to everyone:

1. It encourages people to become reliant on spoonfeeding: As people come to rely on others to solve all their problems, every time even the smallest thing goes wrong with their PC, they quickly return to post about their new problem and wait for someone to spoonfeed them an answer. Rather than learning more about PCs and eventually becoming self-sufficient - which is what this site is about - members become totally reliant on others to do their thinking for them, for even the simplest of questions.

2. It discourages the knowledgeable people from staying: As the forums constantly get flooded with poorly researched questions and the same questions over and over and over, after a while of trying to help, many knowledgeable members who actually provide the free tech support eventually just get sick and tired of typing the same answers to the same questions and simply stop coming to the forums, or visit less often.

3. The overall quality of the forum falls dramatically: The same people who are too impatient and/or unwilling to learn about basic PC operation also tend to post impatiently, immaturely and without purpose about any other topic too, ruining many discussions by turning them into flamewars or fanboy battles. To get attention, these users also often post misleading thread titles, post in ALL CAPITALS, post the same question in multiple places on the forum, derail threads, fill threads with useless comments, abuse other members who disagree, etc. Eventually most of the good members leave the forums, including many of the Moderators, due to the massive amount of work and patience required to deal with this garbage.

In my 9+ years of being online, being involved in a range of forums in various capacities - as a member, a Moderator, an Admin, a person who actually tried to answer tech support questions daily - I have seen all of the above happen time and time again.

A totally open forum which provides unlimited free tech support, while certainly a noble idea, and one which all users want, doesn't work in practice. Forums which attempt to provide it all suffer from a serious degradation of quality. Go to any tech forum around the web today, and you'll find that virtually any thread on any topic is filled with at least 80% garbage: off-topic comments, spam, abuse, wildly inaccurate advice and information, pointless fanboyism - people seem to mistake a forum for a chat room. Finding the few pieces of useful information in these forums is often too tedious to even bother with.

Therefore these forums are firmly focused around the concept of being a tech discussion forum first and foremost, and while tech questions may be raised and answered, it is not the focus of the forums, nor can a member keep posting questions without first undertaking genuine research themselves. The end result is a higher quality of discussion, with each thread being filled with predominantly useful and interesting information which everyone can benefit from, and which does not require a lot of resources to manage.


Why the Restricted Membership?

The TweakGuides Forums were originally started in October 2005, and after a year and half of having them open to anyone and everyone, and constantly trying to evolve them to maintain their quality and purpose, it quickly became painfully obvious that this openness only resulted in the quality of the forums steadily being lowered to the lowest common denominator. No matter what was tried, people simply wanted to use the forums as a place to dump all of their tech questions without doing even a hint of research or reading, without paying attention to the rules, and without discussing things maturely. A large amount of Moderator and Admin effort was required on a daily basis just to keep the forums from devolving into a complete trash heap. This effort was completely unsustainable for a free forum, and so the forums were reluctantly shut down and made read-only in March 2007.

During the shutdown period, as a sort of experiment I invited over 80 of the most productive and mature members from the forums to join me on a private 'Invited Members Only' forum which no-one else could see or join. This resulted in a great atmosphere where every topic, even very controversial topics, were always discussed with maturity and purpose, and without the need for any Moderator or Admin action whatsoever. This demonstrated to me quite clearly that while a totally open forum results in the lowest possible quality, a closed forum with a well-selected membership results in the highest quality with the least effort, and ironically with the most freedom as well.

I therefore decided that I wanted a forum which did not automatically accept everyone and anyone, but which was more selective of who it let it. By definition this is an elitist approach, however it is also quite fair in that anyone can make a case to join, and will be judged by their peers based on the merits of their introduction.

Just as in life, we don't open the doors of our house, post an 'All welcome' sign on the front door and then let anyone and everyone walk in uninvited whenever they want. While we may meet a lot of people every day, we only interact closely with particular people who we feel have something to contribute and are not going to waste our time. The forums now run on essentially the same basis.

While full membership is restricted to Invited Members, the information on the forums is freely available to everyone. In this way, it is hoped that the productive discussions of a relative few will also be of benefit to a larger number of readers.



Ultimately the forum structure and philosophy will not please some people, and I understand that. I'm not trying to please everyone, as that is simply not possible. I'm not trying to create a purely popular forum with hundreds of thousands of members. I'm not trying to provide free tech support. My aim has always been quality over quantity, and will always remain so. I think it's time the Internet had a forum which has very high standards, and which returns the concept of a forum back to its origins: a place for people to meet and discuss things maturely, thoughtfully and productively, and not just a chat room filled with impatient people who feel that everyone else owes them something just because they stick their hand out and say "I want" or "Please help!".

I hope you understand the forum philosophy, and if you're interested in becoming an Invited Member, I encourage you to make a clear case expressing your interest and outlining what you feel you can contribute to this community in the Introductions forum. In the end while this is a private forum, I want a broad cross-section of people to join and contribute so long as they agree with the philosophy laid out above.


Cheers,
Koroush