Communication Guideline

It is of ultimate importance to maintain a community in which everyone feels free to express themselves, review, and comment on each others ideas, both technical and otherwise. Correspondingly, an environment in which individuals are silenced, berated, or are otherwise afraid to speak up is unlikely to foster fruitful dialog.

Those external to the GNOME community should always keep in mind the asymmetry of communication: while your interaction with community members (and in particular, maintainers and long-term contributors) may be singular and fleeting, these members generally interact with a high volume of individuals each day. Before writing a comment, opening a new issue, or engaging as part of any forum or IRC discussion, please take a moment to appreciate that fact.

While communicating, it is expected that all involved participants be respectful and civil at all times and refrain from personal attacks.

Communication Rules

The following behavior will not be tolerated on any occasion:

• Threats of violence: You may not threaten violence towards others or use the site to organize, promote, or incite acts of real-world violence or terrorism. Think carefully about the words you use, the images you post, and even the software you write, and how they may be interpreted by others. Even if you mean something as a joke, it might not be received that way. If you think that someone else might interpret the content you post as a threat or as promoting violence or terrorism, stop. Don't post it. In extraordinary cases, we may report threats of violence to law enforcement if we think there may be a genuine risk of physical harm or a threat to public safety.

• Hate speech and discrimination: While it is not forbidden to broach topics such as age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation, we do not tolerate speech that attacks a person or group of people on the basis of who they are. When approached in an aggressive or insulting manner these (and other) sensitive topics can make others feel unwelcome, or perhaps even unsafe. While there's always the potential for misunderstandings, we expect our community members to remain respectful and civil when discussing sensitive topics.

• Bullying and harassment: We do not tolerate bullying, harassment, or any other means of habitual badgering or intimidation targeted at a specific person or group of people. In general, if your actions are unwanted and you cease to terminate this form of engagement, there is a good chance that your behavior will be classified as bullying or harassment.

• Impersonation: You may not seek to mislead others as to your identity by copying another person's avatar, posting content under their email address, using a similar username, or otherwise posing as someone else. Impersonation and identity theft is a form of harassment.

• Doxxing and invasion of privacy: Don't post other people's personal information, such as phone numbers, private email addresses, physical addresses, credit card numbers, Social Security/National Identity numbers, or passwords. Depending on the context, we may consider such behavior to be an invasion of privacy, with particularly egregious examples potentially escalating to the point of legal action, such as when the released material presents a safety risk to the subject.

• Obscene content: In essence, do not post pornography, gore, or any other depiction of violence.

General Advice

The following advice will help to increase the efficiency of communication with community members:

• Do not post "me too" comments. Use the GitLab reactions instead, e.g. “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”.

• Avoid adding priority, time, or relevance hints if you are not involved with the development of the application. For example, “This is an urgent issue”, or “This should be fixed now”, or even “The majority of users need this feature”.

• Do not use passive-aggressive communication tactics.

• When reporting technical problems with the application, such as misbehavior or crashes, focus on sharing as many details as possible and avoid adding non-technical information to it.

An example of a good issue report:

GNOME Settings crashes when opening the Wi-Fi panel with 3+ Wi-Fi adapters
 
Steps to reproduce (assuming 3+ Wi-Fi adapters are present):
1. Open GNOME Settings
2. Select the Wi-Fi panel
3. Observe the crash
This does not happen with 2 or less adapters. Here is a backtrace of the
crash: backtrace.txt

In contrast, here is an example of a bad issue report:

GNOME Settings crashed while I was trying to connect to the internet. How can such
a thing happen and nobody notice? Did you not test it before releasing it?
This should be fixed as quick as possible!

• When asking for new features, try and add as much information as possible to justify its relevance, why should it not be implemented as an auxiliary program, what problems it would solve, and offer suggestions about how you think it should be implemented.

Example of a good feature request:

GNOME Settings needs to expose IPv6 options
 
As of now, the connection editor dialog does not allow editing various IPv6
options. This is relevant because without some of these options, it is not
possible to have a valid IPv6 configuration and, consequently, not have access
to various websites and services.
 
The list of missing configurations that are essential is:
 
* <Feature A>
* <Feature B>
 
Additionally, the following configurations can optionally be added:
 
* <Feature C>
* <Feature D>
 
Here is a quick sketch I have made showing how I think these options
should be exposed as a user interface: sketch.png.

Example of a bad feature request:

Merge GNOME Tweaks in GNOME Settings
 
The options in GNOME Tweaks are absolutely essential to the majority of us
users. Why was it not merged already? This is an urgent issue and should
have been addressed years ago. You should allocate all your resources on
merging those two applications.

What happens if someone breaks these rules or guidelines?

Actions that may be taken in response to an abusive comment include but are not limited to:

• Content removal (when breaking any of the guidelines or rules)
• Content blocking (when breaking any of the guidelines or rules)
• Formal report to the Code of Conduct Committee (when breaking any of the rules)

These are my edits. I changed a number of things, and a few sentences need full rewriting. Particular the Doxxing section. Please change it accordingly if I didn't capture your voice.

Particular the Doxxing section. Please change it accordingly if I didn't capture your voice.

That whole section was taken from GitHub 📦

Haha ok, well that part was a really confusing couple of sentences.