CCM: Terms of Use and Legal Matters

CCM: Terms of Use and Legal Matters

In this article, you can learn all about the CCM Terms of Use.

Preface

These terms of use have been written to inform CCM users of our conditions of use, in particular when using our communications services (such as the forums), which let users the world over have discussions online.

Any person who visits our site is considered a user, whether or not you have logged in.

CCM's forums are open to everyone to allow as many people as possible to freely discuss computing and other topics related to IT. But to ensure the best possible quality of these discussions and to protect the community from insulting or inappropriate messages, our forums are subject to post moderation. This means that a select group of people (the moderators) are able to delete any messages that don't follow these terms of use.

Scope

CCM creates free content about technology and offers online services that are open to everyone. It's important to keep in mind that among these users are underage children, students, people at work, and mature people seeking to deepen their knowledge of information technology.

Because of this, we ask that all CCM users respect one another by demonstrating a strong community spirit in line with our philosophy.

Moderation Guidelines

Moderators are members of CCM chosen based on the following criteria: involvement on the forums — and in particular, on the technical forums; overall contribution to the enrichment of the community; the correct use of moderator alerts; and the demonstration of diplomacy, interpersonal skills, a capacity for analysis, and technical knowledge.

Moderators' actions are mainly guided by the alert feature offered to forum members that lets them report messages that violate the terms of us:

For more details, see our article on Moderation Guidelines.

CCM users must respect local and international law when interacting on the site. This includes but is not limited to: not attacking the privacy or reputation of other individuals, members or otherwise; not reproducing or sharing work that violates intellectual property law; not condoning any crimes online or in real life, and correctly using peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing software.

For more details, see our article on Legal Matters.

Neutrality

CCM is meant to be an inclusive place for all to learn and to share. This is why users are strongly discouraged against including their political, cultural, or religious views in messages, on the forums, in their signatures, or in their profiles.

To preserve the commercial neutrality of the community, users are not allowed to post links asking other members for their opinions, unless it is done once and does not redirect to content that violates our terms of use or that makes claims that can be reasonably classified as dishonest. URLs are not permitted in signatures.

For more details, see our article on Neutrality.

Respect for Others

Community is one of CCM's key pillars, and the best way to preserve this community is by being respectful of other users during interactions. This includes thanking others when they have helped you, using signs of politeness (like, for example, saying "Please" when asking a question), and being courteous.

Along these lines, we recommend that you avoid demanding answers to your questions or posting your question several times in a forum within a relatively short time period, even if it appears to you that you have been waiting a long time for a response. Contributors will do their best to answer your messages within a reasonable length of time.

For more details, see our article on Respecting Others.

Advice for Writing Messages

Before writing a message in a forum, we recommend that you perform a search of your topic to be sure that your question has not already been asked:

When creating your message, there are a couple of elements that you should consider. The first is the fact that the writing style on a forum is quite different from other writing styles that you may encounter online. For example, a message that may seem aggressive because it has been written in capital letters may not have been intended this way. Still, users are encouraged to take care to write coherent messages with correct grammar and punctuation to make their messages easy to understand for the community.

The second is that, when describing your issue, you should be as clear and concise as possible. This includes thread titles and extends to the body of your message. This will make it as easy as possible for community members to help you with your problem and for other members suffering from the same situation to locate your thread and a possible solution.

For more details, see our article on Advice for Writing.

Internet users often think that cyberspace is a special legal jurisdiction. However, every website, and by extension, all of its users, is still subject to the laws of whichever country the site is hosted in.

Obeying the Law

Among the things that are prohibited and may lead to prosecution are: attacks on other people's privacy (naming third-party individuals without their explicit consent); sending unsolicited electronic messages to users of this site is prohibited; defamation and slander; calling for crimes and misdemeanors to be committed; promoting suicide, discrimination, hatred (especially racism) or violence; condoning any crimes, especially murder, rape, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; denial of crimes against humanity; reproducing, depicting, or distributing any work that is subject to intellectual property rights without approval to do so; advertising or commercial messages; discussions about copying commercial software for any use other than making a backup copy under the conditions allowed by intellectual property laws.

Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing

Using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software is not prohibited by U.S. law. However, despite the debates going on in the government, using software to download or share copyrighted software is.

For this reason, although discussions about using such software are allowed on the forum, any discussion that directly references copying or sharing copyright-protected works will be deleted. If this happens, please do not dispute the deletion of these posts; instead, consider posting messages that do comply with the terms of use.

Answers generated with AI

Our forums are a space of exchange where people from different backgrounds are connected tending towards a single goal: computer assistance.

In order to preserve human interventions and the social aspect of CCM Benchmark forums, it is forbidden to publish mass responses using AI content generating tools such as ChatGPT.

To encourage feedback from users and not robots, here are some rules to follow if you want to use this kind of tool for your answers:

  • AI-generated replies are only allowed on topics that have been published for more than one day and have not received any replies.
  • AI-generated replies must be clearly marked at the beginning, end or signature of the reply with a statement such as "Reply generated with TOOL NAME".