Read Before Posting

Discussion Guidelines

(adapted from the mailing list discussion guidelines)

This is an open forum where people freely come together to discuss Qubes and voluntarily help each other out of mutual interest and good will. They are not your personal, paid support service. No one owes you a reply. No one here is responsible for solving your problems for you. Nonetheless, there are many things you can do to make it more likely that you will receive a reply. This community is fortunate to have an exceptionally large number of friendly and knowledgeable people who enjoy corresponding on this forum. The vast majority of them will be happy to help you if you follow these simple guidelines.

Be polite and respectful

Remember, no one here is under any obligation to reply to you. Think about your readers. Most of them are coming home after a long, hard day at work. The last thing they need is someone’s temper tantrum in their inboxes. If you are rude and disrespectful, you are very likely to be ignored.

Be concise

Include only essential information. Most of your readers lead busy lives and have precious little time. We want to spend some of that time helping you, if we can. But if you ramble, it will be easier to skip over you and help someone else who gets right to the point.

Help us help you

Tell us what you’ve already tried, and which documentation pages you’ve already read. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. What essential information would they require in order to be able to help you? Make sure to include that information in your message. Ask questions the smart way.

Be patient

Do not “bump” a thread more than once every three days at most . If it seems like your messages are consistently being ignored, make sure you’re following the guidelines explained on this page. If you’re already doing so but still not getting any replies, then it’s likely that no one who knows the answer has had time to reply yet. Remember that the devs are very busy working on Qubes. They usually only have a chance to answer questions on the mailing lists once every several days.

Be a good community member

As with any social community, members of the community forum earn different reputations for themselves over time. We want the forum to be a friendly, productive place where information and ideas are exchanged for the mutual benefit of all. We understand that the best way to achieve this is to encourage and cultivate other like-minded individuals. Those who have shown themselves to be good community members through their past contributions have earned our good will, and we will be especially eager to help them and collaborate with them. If you are new to the community, you should understand that it will take time for you to earn the good will of others. This does not mean that you will not receive help. On the contrary, we are fortunate to have such a helpful and understanding community that many of them spend hours of their personal time helping complete strangers, including many who post to the forum anonymously. (Given the integration of Qubes with Whonix, we understand better than most the complexities of privacy and anonymity, and we know that many users have no other choice but to post anonymously.) You can read our project’s Code of Conduct for more information.

Report issues and submit changes in the right places

The forum (and mailing lists) a good place to ask questions and discuss bugs and feature requests. However, if you’re submitting a more formal report, we’d prefer that you submit it to our issue tracker so that it doesn’t get overlooked. Likewise, if you see that something in the documentation should be changed, don’t simply point it out in an email to one of the mailing lists. Instead, submit the change.

Code of Conduct

(from Code of Conduct)

Introduction

This Code of Conduct is a collaborative, evolving document that attempts to transparently set out a public set of standards regarding appropriate conduct in the Qubes OS Project.
It is not intended to be a statement or endorsement, whether implicit or explicit, of any particular political or philosophical attitude, belief, or way of living.
Rather, it is an attempt to find a reasonable middle ground among the inevitable disagreements regarding free expression that arise in a large, diverse community of people from around the world.
It is intended to be a practical means of serving the best interests of our users, contributors, and the project itself.
We welcome you to view the history of changes to this document and the discussion leading to its creation.

Our Pledge

The Qubes OS project creates a reasonably secure OS. In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, sexual identity and orientation, or other characteristic.

Our Standards

Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include:

  • Using welcoming and inclusive language
  • Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
  • Gracefully accepting constructive criticism
  • Focusing on what is best for the community
  • Showing empathy towards other community members

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:

  • The use of sexualized language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or advances
  • Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
  • Reinforcing stereotypical models for illustration of non-technical users (e.g. our mothers/grandmothers, etc.)
  • Public or private harassment, as defined by the Citizen Code of Conduct
  • Publishing others’ private information, such as a physical or electronic address, without explicit permission
  • Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

(Please also see our mailing list discussion guidelines.)

Our Responsibilities

Project maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any instances of unacceptable behavior. This action can include removing, editing, or rejecting comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions, or to ban temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.

Scope

This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event. Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.

Enforcement

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting the project CoC team at mods@qubes-os.org. The project CoC team is the Marek Marczykowski-Górecki, Andrew David Wong, and Michael Carbone. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident, and will ensure reporter, reported and all others impacted are regularly updated through the process. Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.

Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the project’s leadership.

A Note on Trust

Expect all contributions to be reviewed with some amount of healthy adversarial skepticism, regardless of your perceived standing in the community. This is a security project, and allowing ourselves to get complacent while reviewing code simply because it comes from a well-known party would not be in the best interest of the project. Please try not to get offended if you perceive your contributions as being met with distrust – we are most definitely thankful and appreciative of your efforts, but must also remain vigilant in order to ensure continued quality and safeguard against potential sabotage.

Attribution

The initial published version of this Code of Conduct was adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 1.4 and the Rust Code of Conduct.

Further information: