Hackaday.io Creator Status

To keep our community thriving and maintain a high quality of content, we have introduced the creator membership application. This feature ensures that all members on the platform are committed to sharing valuable content. Read on to learn why this process matters, and how you can join our community.

Why apply for creator status?

Hackaday.io is a collaborative platform for engineers, developers, and makers to share projects and ideas. To ensure that all shared content meets our community standards, new users are asked to apply for creator status before they can post projects, pages, or comments. This helps us maintain an inspiring, spam-free environment for everyone.

How to apply

To apply for creator status, you'll need to fill out some information about yourself. This application process helps us understand who you are and what drives you, allowing us to create a high-quality environment that showcases the best of our community.

Here's what you need to include in your application:

1. USERNAME: Choose a unique username that reflects your identity. This will be the name displayed on your profile.
2. YOUR NAME: Provide your real name. This helps build trust in our community.
3. SUMMARY: Write a brief summary about yourself and your interests. This is the first thing others will see, so make it engaging!
4. LOCATION: Tell us where you are based. This helps build connections in our community, especially with local makers.
5. WHO I AM: Describe who you are—what are your skills, interests, and passions? Are you an engineer, a designer, or a hobbyist? Give us a sense of who you are.
6. WHY I'M ON HACKADAY.IO: Let us know what brought you here. Are you interested in collaborating, sharing your own projects, or learning from others? This helps us understand your motivations.
7. PROFILE PHOTO: Upload a real profile photo. It helps personalize your profile and builds a sense of authenticity.
8. SOCIAL LINK: Add at least one social media link (e.g., LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter). This helps verify your identity and provides a way for others to connect with you.

What we look for

We want to see users who are enthusiastic about sharing and collaborating in meaningful ways. Here's what we value most in your application:

• Authenticity: Be yourself! We love seeing real people who are excited about making, hacking, and building.
• Clear intentions: Clearly explain why you're joining and what you plan to contribute. Whether you're here to share your own projects or get inspired by others, we want to know.
• Community spirit: Hackaday.io is a community, and we value users who want to be a part of that—whether it's through sharing knowledge, contributing to discussions, or collaborating with others.

Get started

Once you've submitted your application, our team will review it. Once approved, you'll be able to create projects, post comments, and fully participate in the Hackaday.io community.

Ready to get started? Head over to your profile page to join our growing network of hackers today!

The Hack Chat FAQ

• What is a Hack Chat?
  • Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session where people discuss the interesting things they're doing with the Hackaday community. Hack Chats are fun, informal text-chat sessions that let hackers connect and interact in an in-depth way.
• Who is a Hack Chat for?
  • Everyone! If you read articles on Hackaday.com or post projects on Hackaday.io, chances are pretty good you'll get something from every Hack Chat.
• What is Hack Chat about?
  • Literally everything! We strive to invite a wide range of hosts and cover the hardware hacking universe, and every week is different. One week we could be talking about homebrew radio telescopes, the next we could be discussing the relative merits of different PCB finishing methods. The only thing that's constant about Hack Chat is that it's always interesting.
• Who should host a Hack Chat?
  • Anyone doing anything interesting. Although were certainly like to bring on people with cool jobs, you don't have to be an expert or have some deep knowledge of a topic to make a Hack Chat interesting. Whatever you're working on is probably great fodder for a Hack Chat.
• Is there video or audio for the Hack Chat?
  • Generally, no. We like to keep the Hack Chat text-only wherever possible, because it seems more authentically hackerish. But we occasionally do set up "simulcast" Hack Chats with YouTube livestreams, especially for those topics that really need a live demo.
• Why should I attend a Hack Chat?
  • Because it's fun and you'll learn a ton! Plus, you might just have the one bit of experience that nobody else has that will help move a project forward, or your question might spark a whole new discussion or lead the chat in a totally new direction. Hack Chat isn't a lecture -- it's a conversation. And every conversation needs two or more people to make it worth having.
• Why should I host a Hack Chat?
  • Because it's fun and you'll learn a ton! Literally the first thing most people say after hosting a Hack Chat is how much fun they had, and how fast it all went by. On the more practical side, hosts often find they make valuable contacts with the community and find people who have just the right experience to solve a problem they've been stuck on. Hack Chat moves projects forward and helps stimulate collaboration and cooperation.
• When is Hack Chat?
  • We do Hack Chats at noon Pacific time every Wednesday, with occasional breaks for holidays and such. We chose this time to make Hack Chat accessible to as many people around the world as possible. Hack Chats generally last for an hour, or for however long the host has to give.
• Where does the Hack Chat happen?
  • On the Hack Chat public channel at https://hackaday.io/messages/room/2369
• Can I see previous Hack Chats?
  • Absolutely! We pull a transcript at the conclusion of every Hack Chat and post them publicly here. Hack Chat transcripts are a great way to refer back to a link or a comment that you might have missed.
• How do I find out about upcoming Hack Chats?
  • We promote Hack Chats on all our channels. Every Hack Chat gets an event page on Hackaday.io, so watching the events list is a great place to start. We also do a daily post early in the week of the Hack Chat on Hackaday.com; search by the Hack Chat tag to see a list of all the previous posts.
• How do I get reminders for Hack Chat?
  • Everyone is busy, and we know it can slip your mind that Hack Chat is about to start. So we've got an email reminder that goes out a half-hour before every Hack Chat. If you want to get on the mailing list, sign up here.
• I want to host a Hack Chat. What should I do now?
  
  • We've got an easy sign-up form for that. Just fill it out and someone will get back to you with specifics.
    
• What's the deal with those cool posters for each Hack Chat?
  • Aren't they great? Those posters are the work of Aleksandar Bradic, CTO of Supply Frame. He's got a graphics design background and likes to stay in practice, so he designs a custom poster for every Hack Chat. We think they're great, and he's actually thinking about publishing a compendium...

Hackaday.io Project Guidelines

This will be a simple list of guidelines about what constitutes a legitimate project (as opposed to spam, advertisements, etc.). In conjunction with the Terms of Service and Code of Conduct, it will give users something to shoot for when creating and maintaining projects, and hopefully help increase the quality of Hackaday.io. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, and is subject to change.

1. Indirect advertisements: Hackaday.io will not accept any content that is obviously an advertisement for a third party. We understand that many hackers have sponsorship arrangements with various third-party entities, but we cannot allow Hackaday.io projects to serve as advertisements for these companies.
2. Use of logos: Third-party logos are not allowed on Hackaday.io projects. Projects cannot display third-party logos, either directly and prominently or in the background of project photos, as a watermark, or in any way that's obvious to readers. Project-specific logos are fine, as long as there's no third-party sponsorship.
3. Link farming: Project posts with little more than a series of links to a single third-party website are not allowed.
4. Link dumping: A project whose only content is a single link to some other site presented with no context doesn't advance the state of the art. Worse than that, it's disrespectful to the rest of the Hackaday.io community, who put at least some effort into making projects that people like to read about. We don't have a problem with cross-linking from other project-hosting sites, like Hackster or GitHub. But we have to see at least some effort put into providing context for the Hackaday.io community.
5. Off-topic projects: We at Hackaday.io are an eclectic bunch, and we celebrate all manner of hardware and software projects. We offer wide latitude when it comes to what types of projects people want to post, and we try to keep an open mind. However, some projects are clearly not within the realm of project types that most readers would find interesting. Such projects are subject to deletion on a case-by-case basis.
6. Low-value projects: We understand that everyone is at a different point along their journey in the world of electronics and hardware hacking, and we don't want to judge the relative merits of any particular project. But some projects are obviously simple and quick to design, do not represent any substantial innovation, and are clearly designed only to sell PCBs or components. If a user consistently posts super simple circuits and never seems to make any apparent progress in their learning, that's another huge red flag to us.
7. Obvious spamming: Multiple submissions of low-value projects by a single user in a short time frame are a huge red flag to us. First, it suggests to us that the user is just being paid by a third party to post a bunch of trashy projects. Second, it's a bad look. We recognize that some users will post multiple non-sponsored projects at the same time, but just be aware that this might be misinterpreted by the mods.
8. Empty or incomplete projects: We get it -- not everyone has time to document a project in its entirety in a single sitting. We commonly see new projects that are just a "stub," a placeholder with just a title, and not even a thumbnail image. That's fine, but only for a while -- too many default thumbnails look bad, and a project that stays unpopulated too long is just a waste of valuable space. Stub projects that stay that way too long are subject to deletion.
9. Plagiarism and AI-generated content: Any articles we find that are plagiarized from other sites without proper attribution will be immediately deleted. We'll also delete any AI-generated content, with the obvious exception of projects that explore machine learning systems for the edification of the community.
10. The rest: At the risk of stating the obvious, we will immediately delete any project that contains or solicits anything offensive, harassing, racist, sexist, pornographic, or involving unethical hacking.

When a project...