You would have seen the rules when you joined. For the most part it is don't post ROMS/warez*, by all means have a heated discussion but don't go flaming people, probably best not to post porn and that is about it really. We are all about cheats, hacking consoles to do what we want them to do, homebrew for said same and hacking games to be nicer. If you find any of those contrary to your taste then you might not get far -- nobody particularly cares for those that would ruin online games with cheats so that is about far as anti cheat really goes here.
*falling under that is best if you don't post links to/names of obvious sites (search Suprnova.org for Double_Switch_25th_Anniversary_Edition_NSW-VENOM not going to go well) or usenet groups/subreddits/...
Also don't post keys. Nobody quite knows what the legality of such things and some sites that are far more restrictive about anything vaguely to do with running ROMs will post them all day long but it is what it is, and frankly does not bother conversations too much (say you need a key to disassemble a ROM, you would be free to post the command to do it but say you need to go find the key and enter it here). If it is your own personal key for your own personal device then it is foolish to post it as it will just get banned but play it as you will.
Basically don't poke the bear, and that would also extend to repros are not a great thing (get a flash cart/custom firmware instead as it will probably be a better experience), to say nothing of paying for someone to do ROM hacking work is also a tricky one.
Most of the sections are named for what they do (if you are looking at a section called ROM hacking then that is probably what it is), with the main confusion tending to be emulation ones as they tend to be about emulators of a device rather than homebrew emulators written for the device. We try to keep the politics discussions to the news and politics section (we tend to fall down on the free speech side of the line rather than "OMG you can't say that", something that troubles some people but better than the alternative) and the true silliness and memes to the edge of the forum (once upon a time known as the testing area) but such things occasionally escape.
If you are one of the unfortunates that can't handle a bit of discussion then you can exclude such forums from your
new posts search (the thing I imagine most regulars use to visit the site) then
https://gbatemp.net/account/new-content should be able to remove the sections from it/limit sections it returns.
Try to get something in the right section for the discussion if you can but no big deal if you make an honest effort and miss. By similar token while not required to have a good title then "help me" gets far fewer views/helpful responses than something with a more descriptive title.
We tend to try to keep the stickies somewhat relevant so do have a read if you are in a given section and want to know more/join in a popular topic.
Reviews of games, hardware, hacking devices and more besides are
https://gbatemp.net/reviews/ and are an increasing focus of the place. You can post them as a user if you want.
There is a blogs section that people use much like a blog, you can set things to variously private if necessary.
https://gbatemp.net/blogs/ for that one.
For real time chat there are two things used.
IRC
https://gbatemp.net/chat/
and there is a discord around somewhere but discord is for silly people (discord is the latest in a long line of proprietary protocol services you can't run your own server for and as such I expect it to join the rest of those in irrelevance) so I don't advise that one. Some consider my dislike of discord to be irrational and choose to go on anyway but here I sit resting happily upon the corpses of ventrillo, mumble, teamspeak, msn and more besides while IRC is older than the site and still going strong.
I forget how many posts (posts outside introductions and edge of the forum) you need before you can make private messages but I think it is around 10. If you do need to contact someone then by all means ask and one of us will start a 3 person one and leave/allow the one you want to contact to start a private one. Issues with spammers and banned members being arseholes being the reason for that restriction.
You might also find you can't post links for about the same amount of posts. Break it up if you want http : // www . somesite .tld /blah , or if it is a known service you can say youtube and the unique part of the url. If a staff member wanders by they can turn it into a proper one.
