Thanks 
The first thing we want to say is that we (mods + admins) truly appreciate anyone who has joined Beyond3D and posted something interesting and insightful in the last 25 years or so. We especially appreciate those who have been around for the guts of the last two decades and have seen it all happen in our industry and have stuck around to post about it. The forums are nothing without you posters and your posts.I, @Rys, am also personally deeply thankful and appreciative of the moderators and @BRiT. The moderators for their thankless, tireless service and donation of significant personal time over a huge number of years, and BRiT, who in addition to being a mod too has donated admin help to me so I can keep the lights on when I haven't had the time to focus on things myself, which these days is pretty much every day. Thanks all.
Nobody involved in the forums or main site (yes, that old thing!) has made a penny out of it in almost 20 years. We all just do it for the love of discussing graphics and games and associated tech. The donations system helped pay the infrastructure bills for a bit, but it's never made anything but a (fairly large aggregate) fiscal loss since I took over from Wavey in 2006.
So thanks to everyone despite that! You posters for coming here to post, the moderators for their tireless commitment to trying to make it a cool place to post, and BRiT for his help behind the scenes. We're still online in 2023 because of all that.
Thanks, too, to the old lot that helped back in the early to mid 00s: Wavey, Tim, Arun, Geo, Farid, Alex, William and many others. Writing this has had me think about those good old times quite a bit.
That means Beyond3D runs on goodwill and love for the subject matter. The coffers are nearly dry there, but we want to turn it around. Here's how.
Call for new moderators
We're on the look out for additions to the cohort of moderators. We're looking mostly for people with a solid understanding of everything under discussion, hardware and software, who are willing to collaborate with the other moderators on decision making, and who love Beyond3D and want to see it thrive again.If you think that's you, drop me a line by Discord PM (rys0 is my account) and let me know who you are on the forums if your Discord username doesn't make it obvious. We use Discord to coordinate moderation actions and decisions, so that bit makes sure you have a Discord account.
I'm personally particularly interested in welcoming folks from Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, and the games developers that make the content on top, to the moderation cohort, if you want to identify yourself as such.
I work for AMD and the moderation team includes another GPU vendor person, game developers including folks from Epic and Sony. More industry participation would be exciting and helpful, but it's not necessary. If you want to help regardless of industry participation or walk or life then please just say so, everyone is welcome to apply.
On to the main topic at hand.
Architecture and Products Subforum Reopening + General Rules Refresh
As we look to re-open the Architecture and Products subforum soon, we want to reestablish the rules and guidelines around what topics should be fostered in this area of the forum, what they should and shouldn't contain, and where you might look for related topics elsewhere in other parts of the forum.We also want to refresh and reestablish the general rules and guidelines for the forum at large, writing down a more concrete set of rules and expectations for posters, to help guide contributions to high signal:noise as much as possible, along with making any moderation actions clearer and easier to understand.
The number one thing that caused the switch of the Architecture and Products subforum to read-only in early January was the seemingly constant thread brigading and personal attacks, leading to what felt like endless negativity and burnout, both for thread participants and the moderation team struggling to keep signal:noise high.
Graphics in all its forms should be fun and positive to discuss, and the enjoyment of discussing it is what Beyond3D was founded on. And there's so much to enjoy these days.
GPUs are at the foundation of multiple high-tech industries collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars across the products and services built on top of them. Over a billion humans carry at least one relatively tiny one around with them every day, all the way up to the biggest ones sit that underpin the modern machine learning boom. There's a GPU almost everywhere you turn in tech and entertainment, so there's a lot for us to discuss.
The biggest ones, and the machines and computer systems that design and manufacturer them, are some of the most complicated systems human beings have ever made, and the engineering feats and human effort it takes to get any GPU to market are nothing short of breathtaking if you truly understand the scale and complexity of everything going on.
So when discussion of GPU architecture and products here turns sour thread after thread, with none of the wonder of graphics shining through, very little technical detail, and all of the fun in discussing how it all works is sucked away by yet another pointless cross-vendor comparison or slew of personal attacks that makes it impossible to dig in and learn something new, it's deeply sad.
We want GPUs and GPU-based products to be examined and compared at Beyond3D, since the detail of investigative understanding and in-depth comparisons shine a light on how things work today, and inform how they could potentially be improved in the future. But the repetitive high-level comparisons that restate the same broad thing over and over aren't illuminating, helpful or advance our collective understanding.
We've discussed just turning the whole forum off recently, since the worst aspects of the threads that made us pause A+P, and the worst posters in them, just found new bits of the forum to infect and turn sour.
So we'll have one last go at turning the ship around with new rules and guidelines for both A+P and the forum at large, reopen A+P soon, and see how we get on.
The number one thing we want is fun, positivity and an inquisitive look at things wherever possible, rather than misery and negativity and no attempt to think or add something that maintains or boosts the signal of the discussion. That doesn't mean you can't be negative about something, but it does mean it has to come with respect, curiosity, thoughtfulness and substantive comment now, to back up the viewpoint.
Basically just try to have a good time, and try and make sure that readers of your posts get to the end of them having had a good time too.
As one of the human beings with feelings that helps make the things that get discussed, please remember that there are human beings with feelings behind everything we're talking about. They pour their passion, knowledge, creativity, commitment, and often life-long careers into making GPUs.
We want to see people enjoying that work, thinking about how things work or came into being, and being curious about it all, even if the work manifests in something that didn't quite hit the mark and there's criticism to be levelled. Positive constructive criticism helps makes the next thing better. Baseless negative shilling and shitposting does not. We don't get to the end of those posts having had a good time.
On to the specific Architecture and Products subforum reopening bits. We want to clarify what kind of threads are viable in A+P, which aren't, and clarify what we're looking for when it comes to cross-vendor discussion in any thread.
Allowed thread topics
- Pre-release microarchitecture and product speculation
- Post-release product review roundups
- Post-release microarchitecture, chip and product spec discussions
- Microarchitecture performance analysis and analysis tool development
- Product performance analysis
- Physical design and related areas (manufacturing, packaging, etc) for GPU ASICs and GPU-based products
- Pre-release rumour roundups
Disallowed thread topics
- Graphics techniques and APIs (Rendering Technology and APIs subforum for those), unless it's about the underlying microarchitectural and/or driver + compiler details
- Anything cryptomining related
- Anything related to business performance, sales, marketing, etc (Graphics and Semiconductor Industry for those)
Cross-vendor discussion
Heavily moderated now. Any post comparing one vendor to another has to be as technical, in-depth, respectful, curious, thoughtful and substantive as possible now. Posts can't be repetitive, can't be a pile on, can't be high-level. Either they dig in to something technically substantial in a good way or they will likely be removed.General forum guidelines and rules
Then on to the general posting guidelines and rules for the forums at large, which we're revising at the same time. Deep breath, we're nearly there.In resetting the general posting guidelines and rules, the overall approach was to review the existing set and then try to make them much clearer what we're looking for, what we're not, reset the overall tone, and provide more of a clear framework under which posters can post and moderators can moderate.
We can't legislate for the contents of every last post, so that means we don't want, and won't put up with, posters who feel hard done by with moderation using the published guidelines and rules to endlessly litigate the moderation actions and argue against them.
The eagle-eyed among you might wonder what's a rule and what's a guideline. That's on purpose, so moderation can adapt to the changing tides of discussion. The general gist should now be clear.
There will always be room for moderator interpretation, and there is no given right to post here or hold a particular kind of discussion. If the mods decide to take a moderation action, be that a post deletion or move, thread post ban, temporary whole forum post ban, or full please fuck off and never come back ban, we welcome feedback (even for that last kind of mod action).
To do that, either email rys@beyond3d.com or come and say hello on Beyond3D's Discord server and put your query in the #feedback channel.
New guidelines and rules
The Beyond3D forum community rules are minimal, straightforward and all underpin a core tenet of "be nice to each other and have fun". There's a lot of scope for an unnecessarily heated discussion in 3D graphics and we discourage it at Beyond3D. We value politeness, friendliness, respect, civility and keeping the conversation on-topic and moving forwards.Circular discussion and argument is frowned upon pretty heavily, as is moving off-topic rapidly, shilling for your favourite company, and not listening to experienced members or moderators.
We have a lot of industry participation on the forums from all walks of graphics and semiconductor life. In fact, that's one of the great things about Beyond3D: you can be posting in a thread about a game or a piece of hardware and the folks who built it might could pop up and add something to the discussion.
So the rules and guidelines are:
- Have a good time! The Beyond3D forums are an excellent place to discuss graphics technologies, games, consoles, handheld devices and more. Have a great time posting and help others have a great time too when they read your posts.
- Keep colourful language to a strict minimum. It almost always just adds noise and rarely boosts signal.
- Longer thoughtful posts are preferred to shorter off-the-cuff ones that add less to the discussion. Investing the time there usually increases the value of threads.
- Keep your bias in check. Bias and preference are unavoidable in a lot of cases, but rarely do they help move any discussion forwards. Talk about what you like and don't like positively, respectfully, with curiosity, and constructively wherever possible.
- If you're a company marketer or shill, please just go somewhere else. Seriously, if you're acting on behalf of a company to overtly promote its products or rubbish the competition, please leave and find another place on the Internet to make worse.
- If you're banned, please see out the ban, be it a thread post ban or a full forum post ban. If you want to talk about why you were banned, as a banned user you can still message the moderation team, or ask a question in the #feedback channel on Beyond3D's Discord server (https://discord.gg/CfhJYQaDm8).
- Zero brigading, personal attacks, overt negativity, shallow dismissals or low-effort shitposting of any kind. Signal must be maintained or boosted at all times.
- If your post doesn't address the topic, but instead addresses a person, your post will be removed and you'll receive a thread post ban of some kind.
- Be kind, curious, thoughtful, respectful, positive where possible, and friendly.
- Comments should get more thoughtful, substantial and considerate of the topic as the topic advances, not less.
- If you're disagreeing, reply respectfully to the argument, not the person.
- Assume good faith and the strongest plausible version of what's in a post.
- Stay on topic and avoid tangents (if those tangents are interesting, please start a new thread for them).
- No uppercase for emphasis. Use the text formatting tools at your disposal.
- Don't post about brigading, astroturfing, shilling, manipulation or the like. Let the moderators know privately via PM or ask on Discord and we'll look at it.
- No link-only posts with no summary and following commentary, especially single links to "leaker" accounts on Twitter. If you bring a link or quote or similar to the table for discussion, you should lead the discussion with a thoughtful summary and reasoning as to why you feel it‘s valuable to discuss.
- Listen to the moderation team. We have over 100 person years of community moderation experience between us, so if we ask you to do something around your behaviour or posting style, please heed their advice or instruction.
Lastly, we have a basic user promotion system. It's not something to game, but more of an indication of how long and prolifically someone's been participating over the years:
- 0-249 posts, you're a Newcomer
- 250-999 posts, you're a Regular
- 1000-4999, you're a Veteran
- 5000+, you're a Legend
You get various extra stuff as you make your way up the ranks, but nothing crazy. Regulars and above can edit their own posts, have a signature, and give themselves custom user tiles, Veterans can add colour to their signatures.
Discord server invite!
Beyond3D Discord!
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