What changed: To enhance the security of your account and the site, we now use Cloudflare Turnstile instead of Google reCAPTCHA to stop bots on sign-in, sign-up, password reset, forum posting and the contact form. Cloudflare receives your IP address and some browser details for the check; Google no longer does.

The next time you sign in you will be shown what changed and asked to agree. You can keep reading either way; posting waits until you have agreed.

Questions? Reply here, or write to us.

There is a new rule about how you link to something you are recommending. It is in section 2 of the Terms, in the Patch Panel Rules, and in the pinned rules topic. The short version:

Recommend by the vendor's own domain. If you point someone at a product, a tool or a download, link to the vendor's own website at its real address. Not a marketplace or reseller listing — Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Temu, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace or any site like them — and not a mirror, a link shortener or a download aggregator.

Two reasons, and neither is about tidiness.

Those listings are where counterfeit hardware and repackaged installers come from. A cable or a drive from a marketplace listing may not be what the box says, and "the same thing cheaper" is often the same thing with something added.

And a lookalike download page is how a great deal of what we write about in The Cache arrives in the first place. Someone searches for a tool, clicks the first result, and installs something that shares a name with it and nothing else. If we are going to write articles about cleaning that up, we should not be the place it starts.

Nothing changes about recommending things. Recommending a tool you actually use is the reason people come here, and it is explicitly not advertising. If you have a commercial interest in what you are recommending, say so in the post — that has not changed either.

While we were in there, the rules page now names harassment directly rather than leaving it to be inferred from "disagree with the answer, never with the person". The Terms always said it. The rules page should say it too.

What happens when you post a link. The post waits for a moderator before it appears. It is not refused and it is not lost: it is saved, we are told straight away, and it goes up as soon as it is read. The site is days old and moderation here is one person, so this is how the rule gets kept without anyone losing a question to a filter.

You can ask first. If you want a recommendation cleared in advance, or you think a link was held when it should not have been, write to us. Choose "Something else" and say which link and why. That is a better use of the contact form than most things on it.

Questions, or think a rule is wrong? Reply here, or write to us.

Section 9 now covers inactive accounts. If an account is not used for 24 months, we email the address on it to say it is due for deletion. Signing in at any point resets the clock and nothing else happens. If the account is still unused 30 days after that email, we delete the profile: the account, the email address on it, and profile details such as the display name, avatar and signature.

Posts stay. Anything you wrote remains on the site, shown as "Former member" rather than your name, so that questions and the answers under them stay useful to whoever finds them next. That is the whole point of a knowledge base: an answer that vanishes because someone moved on helps nobody. If you would rather your posts went too, you can ask, and there is a link in the warning email.

Why bother? Holding on to an email address and a profile for someone who stopped visiting years ago is not something we can justify. Keeping less is the honest default, and now it happens on a schedule rather than whenever anyone remembers.

Nobody is close to this. The site is days old, so the earliest anything could happen is two years from now, and the warning comes first either way.

The full wording is in the Terms, section 9. The Privacy Policy was updated to match, in the section on how long we keep things.

Questions here, or to contact@keh-tech.net.

Because that means a new service receives information about you, the privacy policy has been updated. It now has a section called When you sign in with Google setting out precisely what is involved:

• We ask Google for two basic permissions, email and profile.
• Google sends us four things: your Google account ID, your name, your email address, and the address of your profile picture.
• Your name becomes your display name here and the picture becomes your avatar. You can change either afterwards.
• We never see your Google password, and we cannot read your Gmail, contacts, calendar or Drive.
• We do not keep an access token, so this site cannot do anything on your behalf at Google.
• You can disconnect Google from your profile page at any time and carry on with your password.

The policy also records that signing in happens on Google's own page, where Google sets its own cookies, and that the link between the two accounts is kept until you disconnect it or delete your account.

Nothing changes for existing accounts, and no action is needed. If you would rather not use it, simply do not press the button.

Questions about any of this are welcome — reply here, or use the contact form.

1. Be civil.
Disagree with ideas, not people. No harassment, hate speech, threats or personal attacks. Everyone was new once, so there are no stupid questions here.

2. Stay on topic and be helpful.
Search before you ask. Post in the right board: Help for problems, General for everything else. Give your topic a title that describes the problem, not "Help!!".

3. Protect secrets.
Never post passwords, keys, tokens, internal hostnames or IP addresses, or other people's personal data. Scrub logs and screenshots before you share them. If you slip, tell a moderator and we will remove it quickly.

4. No spam, and recommend by the vendor’s own domain.
No advertising, affiliate links, link dropping or self-promotion that is not a genuine answer to the discussion. Recommending a tool you use is fine. Selling one is not. When you do recommend something, link to the vendor’s own site at its real address — not Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Temu, TikTok, Facebook Marketplace or any site like them, and not a mirror, a shortener or a download aggregator. Those listings are where counterfeit hardware and repackaged installers come from. A post with a link waits for a moderator before it appears — your post is saved and we are told at once. Ask us through the contact form if you want a recommendation cleared in advance.

5. Nothing illegal or harmful.
No malware, pirated software or license keys, and no instructions meant to break into systems you do not own or have permission to test. Security topics are welcome when they are about defending and understanding systems.

6. Post only what you have the right to share.
Do not paste copyrighted articles, paid course material or confidential company documents. Link to the source and quote the part that matters.

7. Do not disrupt the site.
No scraping that burdens the server, no attempts to get around moderation or security, no impersonating others, and one account per person.

How to ask a question that gets answered

• Say what you were trying to do, what happened instead, and the exact error message or code.
• Include the details that matter: Windows and application versions, whether the PC is domain joined, what changed recently.
• List what you have already tried, so nobody suggests it again.
• When it is fixed, come back and say what did it. That reply is the most valuable one in the thread.

Advice here is used at your own risk
Answers come from members sharing their experience in good faith. They are not tailored to your environment. Understand a command before you run it, test outside production, keep backups, and follow your own organisation's change control.

How moderation works
Your first few posts are held for a quick review before they appear, and new members cannot post links or attachments until a few posts have been approved. That is only there to keep spam out. Moderators may edit, move, close or remove posts that break these rules, and may suspend accounts that keep breaking them. If you see a problem post, use its Report button. If you think a moderation decision was wrong, use the contact form.

Thanks for being here, and for helping keep this a good place to get unstuck.

Karl