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I've seen my fair share of 'shady' per-se questions on here, and am looking for input on where we draw the line.

There are several places that we could draw this metaphorical line:

What should we allow? It can be using one of these points, or even something in between.

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    One thing to remember even for those of us not lawyers - Illegal contains three elements: 1) Jurisdiction - where in the world is the action being done 2) Action as opposed to talking about or explaining how things work 3) Judge to balance many laws and contracts to come up with case law which often is different than regulatory or statuatory law. (i.e. EULA may not even be a contract in many jurisdictions) +1 for raising the issue so we all can ponder what being a worldwide source of knowledge means in terms of process here for guiding our FAQ
    – bmike Mod
    Jul 24, 2017 at 20:40
  • @bmike These are all excellent points! A perfect example (albeit a totally random thought on my behalf), is a debate that raged in Australia in the 1990s around drug law reform. Actions such as smoking marijuana was both illegal and a criminal offence, and yet it was perfectly legal to sell and/or own the paraphernalia used to smoke marijuana. And, if you were caught in possession of the drug, you could be charged even if there was no evidence that you actually smoked it, but being in possession of goods that served no other purpose but to smoke it, was perfectly fine.
    – Monomeeth Mod
    Jul 25, 2017 at 13:40
  • Coming back to more on topic examples, many questions here about setting up and using VPNs (some of which I've answered), are probably really about circumventing geolocation barriers so that users can watch Netflix etc in other regions, but we'd never disallow these questions as VPNs are both perfectly legal, and serve fully legitimate purposes as well. There's no doubting that this is a very relevant issue to ponder, and your reminder that AD is a worldwide resource is certainly worth consideration.
    – Monomeeth Mod
    Jul 25, 2017 at 13:42

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I believe that we should allow jailbreak related questions. There's a big enough community - and as long as they aren't questions like When will an iOS 11.0.4 jailbreak come out they are fine. Might as well add in a jailbreak tag. Oh, wait - we already have one:

I also believe that we should disallow hackintosh questions. Since these are already going to be highly technical, they may confuse some of the newcomers, and can also detract from the community. They will be asking about non-apple parts, and that can get a little messy. Also, the hackintosh community's a little too small for this right now.

Finally, I think we should disallow questions about piracy because that's straight-up illegal, and we're actually forbidden from posting about it on StackExchange, from what I've determined from the ToS and content policy

Summary:

Should we allow...

  • Jailbreak: YES
  • Hackintosh: NO
  • Piracy: NO
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    The Hackintosh debate was settled long ago and we allow the questions. The jailbreak debate was also settled and for the most part we allow the questions. Copyright laws vary wildly from country-to-country so what is and isn't a copyright violation is difficult to determine canonically. Ergo, your example for "piracy" would also stand as a legitimate question on the site (Beta-Max anyone?).
    – Ian C.
    Jul 25, 2017 at 4:14
  • @IanC. Just so you know, the help center is out of date for the Hackintosh questions - it says we do not allow questions about installing apple software on non apple hardware
    – jacksonwelsh
    Jul 25, 2017 at 4:26
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    I have to say I can see both the arguments for and against allowing Hackintosh questions. But as a moderator I have to say that all things considered, the site overall is better off without them. I think for most users they'd end up just adding a lot of noise to the site and would detract from the overall user experience (that is unless we restricted the use of tags somehow, but even then it's problematic). Not to mention that there are many excellent online resources for users who want to build a Hackintosh.
    – Monomeeth Mod
    Jul 25, 2017 at 13:57
  • In terms of piracy, the question for me isn't so much about whether they should or shouldn't be permitted, it's moreso about how one makes the judgment as to when a question is or isn't actually about piracy? I'm comfortable with the idea of letting the community decide that with the power of their votes, remembering of course that anyone can reword a question to get it re-opened.
    – Monomeeth Mod
    Jul 25, 2017 at 13:57
  • @Jackson1442 we'll update the Help Center then!
    – Ian C.
    Jul 25, 2017 at 23:15

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