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Tweakers.net
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tweakers.net (often abbreviated as T.net) is a Dutch website featuring news and information about hardware, software and the internet. The website was founded in 1998 by Femme Taken, a computer enthusiast, under the name World of Tweaking as a small sideproject to offer a Dutch alternative to hardware review sites like Tom's Hardware Guide. The verb "tweaking" in the title refers to the process of tweaking the hardware of a computer, as a form of optimisation. Thus, the site's visitors are called tweakers, not to be confused with methamphetamine users. Nowadays its primary feature is the publication of summaries of news and other technology-related articles on other websites. This is why Tweakers.net is often regarded as the Dutch clone of Slashdot albeit with a stronger Windows orientation than Slashdot. However, Tweakers.net has grown substantially since its conception and has many more features for the computer enthusiast. These include hardware reviews, bi-monthly Best Buy guides, a classifieds section for jobs and used hardware, the Pricewatch and the Shop Survey. While the majority of the reviews are written in Dutch, there are several articles translated into English because they cover a non-standard topic. Another important area of the site is the forum.
As of March 2006, Tweakers.net has been taken over by the Dutch media conglomerate VNU.
Tweakers.net's forum is known as the Gathering of Tweakers (often abbreviated as GoT). The forum is mainly focused on technical subjects and maintains a relatively high standard of posting, even though some computer scientists say the forum is very amateuristic judging by the many non-qualified people on it. It has a fairly strong moderation policy, especially when compared to other online discussion forums. Users of the forum are strongly urged to read the FAQ and to have invested a fair amount of his/her own time into finding an answer, either on GoT using the search tools, or anywhere else on the internet, before asking a question.
Gathering of Tweakers is currently ranked as the 23rd most popular (by number of posts) message board by big-boards.com, with more than 18 million posts and over 150,000 members.