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Rules

1. Your site must be related to classic computing
It has to contain contents in relation to classic computer software or hardware, such as game reviews or walkthroughs, downloads of free or abandoned applications or operating system, manuals or even listings of hardware specifications.

2. Absolutely no 'warez' of any kind
This ring concentrates on promoting the idea of Abandonware. If your site is offering illegal downloads, only those of truly abandoned software are allowed here. We expect every webmaster to have informed himself about the meaning of this and thought about whether his/her site matches this definition of not.

3. No porn on your site
This is, of course, subject to our interpretation. Anything even remotely reminding of pornography is giving our scene a bad name, so we are quite strict about it.

4. No links to warez or porn sites
Your site shouldn't contain links to other websites which carry either since these things don't have a place in our scene.

5. You must have a TUOL-Button (linked to http://www.tuol.org/) on your main page

6. Do not copy contents from other sites
Stealing reviews, screenshots or any other contents another webmaster came up with is probably the lowest you can sink. Also, just mirroring another site and not adding anything unique isn't really productive and therefore not accepted.

7. No linkstealing
Linking directly to another site's files costs the respective webmasters money and steals credit for providing these files away from them.

8. No obstrusive ads
We are aware that server costs can easily go through the roof, but your website has to stay usable. Pop-ups are one of the most annoying forms of advertisements, so your site shouldn't contain too many of them. Also, if your site contains more 'conventional' banners than unique contents, it will be rejected. Forcing visitors to click banners isn't acceptable, either, since support from the visitors has to be purely voluntarily. How many ads are still acceptable for your site depends on its type, of course. Huge download archives spread over several dedicated servers certainly need more ads than a pure review site hosted on Geocities.

9. No commercialized sites
It's against the spirit of Abandonware to make money with the work of others. That means that sites with the obvious goal to make profit will not be accepted. Selling copied games, making some of your services paid or basically anything involving money (other than the option for voluntary donations, of course) isn't tolerated.

10. All contents of your site have to be freely accessable
Forced registration is only ok if it's totally free and if all contents are immediately accessable after that. It's not allowed to give out any contents to special restricted groups of people, like contributors, forum regulars or donators.

11. Do not lie to your visitors about legality
You don't have to explain all the possible legal consequences of Abandonware and warn your visitors of anything that might happen, but telling them that Abandonware is legal is not acceptable either. If you don't want to talk about Abandonware being illegal just don't tell anything else - after all you might WISH Abandonware was legal, but up to now it isn't! Same goes for other weird disclaimers about a '24-hour-rule' or the 'Internet Privacy Act' which are nothing but urban legends.

12. TUOL reserves the right to remove any site from our listing for any reason we see fit or for no reason at all


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Appendix A

What is Abandonware?
There are different definitions of the term 'abandonware' - the most common definitions say that abandonware is software 3 years / 5 years or older and not being sold. TUOL leaves it up to its membersites what minimum-age they set for their games. However software being made available for download on our membersites has to be abandoned - meaning it may not be sold anymore. This does not include second-hand-software of course or a last package lying around in a shop for years. See The Abandonware Network's warez list for commonly mistaken games that are still being sold. For a more detailed explanation of what's Abandonware, check out the Abandonware Network's FAQ.


Appendix B

Researching Games
So you got that nice game that is quite some years old and you are planning to put it up? Well, your first step could be to have a look at the list above. Now you didn't find your game - that doesn't necessarily mean that it is really Abandonware. Maybe you have been the first one to discover that great game and noone else has ever thought about putting it up.

Your next step should be to have a look at the website of the developer/publisher. In most cases the URLs are pretty easy - Interplay for example has www.interplay.com, Electronic Arts (also owns Origin, Westwood and some others) can be found at www.ea.com, Apogee is at www.apogee1.com. All pretty easy to find. Usually my first look is into their Online-Stores - if they are still making money from their product it is most likely that they will sell it online.

OK, you didn't find your game here, or maybe you aren't sure about the company that holds the copyright (Infocom for example has been sold to Activision, you won't find anything when you try to look at www.infocom.com - that's a totally different company). Now you do what all the ordinary Internet-Surfers do - you use a Searchengine! My personal favorite is Hotbot, but you might have other preferences. Sooner or later you will find out over this way if this game is still being sold or not - though it can take some minutes.

And a last hint from myself: In many cases your search can be very fast if you look for your game at Interplay's Online Store. Interplay bought the copyrights of many older games and their Online Store is pretty big and easy to navigate.


Appendix C

What happens if your site does not comply with our rules...
If you are not a member of TUOL yet it's pretty simple: you won't get accepted. If you are rejected for linkstealing you also risk to be banned from TUOL for lifetime (YOU, not only your website) unless you make obvious that it was accident and will never happen again.

OK, so you already ARE a member of TUOL and broke our rules. Now it depends on what you did - normally you will be contacted by one of our webmaster and he will tell you about the problem and ask you to fix it. We expect you to fix it within one week then, otherwise we would have to remove your site from our listing - if things are delayed for what reason ever and you need a little longer you can always get back membership at TUOL by simply submitting your site again.

Now there ARE exceptions from this - first of all: Linkstealing - this was already mentioned above and if it is clear that you stole links belonging to another site without having permission from the other webmaster (we check that as well) you will be removed from the listing instantly (and we don't even take the time and wait till the next update in the evening for this) and you are banned. Next one would be porn or porn-banners. You would also be removed at once, but you are not banned (but you of course can't get back on the list with that kind of content on your site).

In cases not mentioned here we might also ask you for faster reactions and please take it serious as we don't come up with complaints to harass our membersites but to provide a working infrastructure between the sites and a "clean" image of abandonware (at least as far as it concerns TUOL as that's... well... our site ;) ).

In some cases, we can also suspend your site temporarily. That means we'll take it off the listing and you'll be notified of that. You will be asked for a statement on this then. Sometimes, we just need some time to do further research on something. Like when we suspect your site could be a linkstealer (if your download links look somehow suspicious to us, but we can't prove anything yet). If it turns out our suspicion wasn't justified, you'll of course be re-added immediately again.

Also we are always open for discussions, but accept that no means no and asking another webmaster of TUOL will not change that in 99.9% of all cases. You can of course freely contact another TUOL webmaster to get a 'second opinion', but in cases which are hard to decide, we consult each other anyway. Oh and... we reserve the right to remove sites from our listing that notoriously break our rules even if every single incident was just a minor one, but you'll of course get one or the other warning before that happens. You as the webmaster are responsible for your site complying with our rules - don't 'just try' hoping we won't notice! Because we will sooner or later. And if it's a really obvious case of rulebreaking then (like having no button up or very common examples for oldwarez), we could get suspicious how serious you are about being a member...



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