We would like you to help us build a vibrant community around the SIMP project. To do so, we would ask that everyone follow a few simple guidelines for community participation.
- Be nice: Be courteous, respectful and polite to fellow community members. No offensive comments related to gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion; no sexual images in public spaces, real or implied violence, intimidation, oppression, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, or unwelcome sexual attention will be tolerated. We like nice people way better than mean ones!
- Encourage diversity and participation: Make everyone in our community feel welcome, regardless of their background, and do everything possible to encourage participation in our community.
- Keep it legal: Basically, don't get us in trouble. Share only content that you own, do not share private or sensitive information, and don't break the law.
- Stay on topic: Make sure that you are posting to the correct online channel and avoid off-topic discussions. Also remember that nobody likes spam. Also, please remember that this is not the forum for engaging in political discussions. While you are 100% entitled to your opinion, and the right to voice that opinion, there are better places to have those discussions.
- No Commercial Product Advertising: While we appreciate that other products/projects may be absolutely amazing, please do not address our community with blatant advertisements. That said, if you have an awesome Open Source project that is related to SIMP, absolutely feel free to post to discussion mailing list!
The point of this section is not to find opportunities to punish people, but we do need a fair way to deal with people who are not productive to the community. Extreme violations of a threatening, abusive, destructive or illegal nature will be addressed immediately and are not subject to 3 strikes.
- First occurrence: We’ll give you a friendly, but public reminder that the behavior is inappropriate according to our guidelines.
- Second occurrence: We will send you a private message with a warning that any additional violations will result in removal from the community.
- Third occurrence: Depending on the violation, we may need to delete or ban your account.
Notes:
- Illegal activity will be reported to the appropriate authorities.
- Obvious spammers are banned on first occurrence.
- Violations are forgiven after 6 months of good behavior, and we won’t hold a grudge.
- People who are committing minor formatting / style infractions will get some education, rather than hammering them in the 3 strikes process.
- Contact [email protected] to report abuse or appeal violations. In the case of appeals, we know that mistakes happen, and we’ll work with you to come up with a fair solution if there has been a misunderstanding.
- Getting Technical Help
- HipChat Guidelines
- Mailing List Guidelines
- Bug Guidelines
- Git / Source Guidelines
While SIMP has been around for a while, the Open Source community is extremely new. As such, we're going to make mistakes, and possibly not be as responsive as we should in some cases. We ask your understanding while we try to navigate the various pitfalls of community building.
- For quick questions, hop onto the SIMP Discussion HipChat room
- Join the simp-users google group and use the search box on the group page to search the mailing list. This eliminates duplicate hits from ML mirrors and lets you order results by date.
We also post the SIMP Product Documentation online.
For general Puppet issues, please see the Puppet Labs help pages.
For all other external products, please see their respective vendor pages.
We're happy to help with SIMP configuration issues and questions relating to the stock configurations, but the community will become too unfocused if we attempt to handle the entire extended ecosystem.
If you can't solve a problem on your own, there are a lot of places you can go to get help from (and help back!) your fellow community members. The sections below cover the norms and expectations in each area of the SIMP Community.
Due to lack of easy access to IRC for some of our audience, we've gone with HipChat as a viable web-based alternative. Many thanks to Atlassian for being willing to provide gratis resources for Open Source projects!
We're essentially following the same guidelines as most IRC channels, so please read and understand this fantastic guide to getting help for open-source projects on irc before diving in. All of the points there apply to our rooms, especially
- Don’t repeat yourself
- Don’t ask to ask
- Stick around
Everyone involved in the project works on various other tasking during the day so our response time is limited.
Be aware that the HipChat rooms are not an official support channels. If you do not receive an answer to your question, keep plugging away at your problem. It is likely that you will receive a notification via e-mail if someone answers you directly. Also, don't get discouraged! We'll do our best to address any bugs that come our way but we've all got to take care of our immediate tasking first.
We also have a few HipChat-specific guidelines:
- Be polite: Treat people with respect and consideration.
- Be helpful: Be patient with new people and be willing to jump in to answer questions.
- Stay calm: The written word is always subject to interpretation, so give people the benefit of the doubt and try not to let emotions get out of control.
- Don't post chunks: Avoid posting big chunks of text --- use pastebin, GitHub Gists,
or a similar service to shorten it to a link.
- HipChat is awesome about preserving links over time so this can be really useful for others.
- Be patient: Folks might not be around when you ask a question, so wait a
while for someone to speak before leaving.
- Do not abuse the direct addressing feature of HipChat. If you do this, you will be banned from the rooms.
- Search first: Believe it or not, your question might not be new or you might be able to find someone who has already asked or answered your question. Do a search of the HipChat room history to see if it has been answered before.
- Don't private message: Ask permission before you send someone a private message (PM). Not everyone likes them. Also, by keeping it in public, others with similar issues can see the solution you were given.
Remember, when you post to a community mailing list, you are, in effect, asking a large group of people to give you some of their time and attention --- to download your message, read it, and potentially reply to it. It is simply polite to make sure your message is relevant to as many of the people receiving the message as possible. Many of the guidelines below stem from this basic principle.
SIMP Community Mailing Lists
- simp : A QA Board for the general community.
- simp-users : A place for users of SIMP to ask questions, get help, and be part of the community.
- simp-dev : This list is for the development community interested in extending or contributing to the platform.
- simp-announce : Announcements for new versions and security events.
- simp-security : A place to file security related issues that will only be seen by the SIMP team.
Search First
- Believe it or not, your question might not be new. Do a thorough search of the mailing list archives (linked above) to see if it has been answered before.
- You waste everyone's time if you post repeat questions.
Stay on Topic
- Review a few posts from our lists before deciding where to post your question (see links to mailing lists above).
- Recruiters are not permitted to post jobs to our mailing lists.
- This is not a location for political discussion. There are lots of opinions out there and you are entitled to voice yours. However, it is not conducive to the building of a better Community or project so please take it somewhere where it will be more valued.
- Please no commercial advertisements. We use software and like software but blatant advertisements just irritate people in general.
Avoid Cross-Posting
- If you have a question, please pick the list that is most relevant to your topic and post the question only on that list.
- Only important community announcements (like conferences, new releases, etc.) should be posted to multiple lists at the same time. When you post to multiple lists, please specify which one list people should reply to with questions and put the other lists in the bcc.
Keep It Short
Remember that thousands of copies of your message will exist in mailboxes:
- Keep your messages as short as possible.
- Avoid excessively long log output (select only the most relevant lines, or place the log on a website or in a pastebin, instead if the log messages are very long).
- Don't excessively quote previous messages in the thread (trim the quoted text down to only the most recent/relevant messages).
- Yes, we know that most email applications are horrible at this, just try to remember when you can.
Use Proper Posting Style
- Please avoid using HTML or Rich Text: Set your mailer to send only plain text messages to avoid getting caught in our spam filters and avoid irritating people who have disabled these types of formats.
- Use top, interleaved posting where possible: Top, interleaved posting is stating any globally relevant information at the top of your post and then replying to the relevant parts of the previous correspondence just below the block(s) of sentences. For a comment to another block of sentences of the same quoted text, you should move below that relevant block again. Do not reply below the whole of the quoted text. Also, remove any irrelevant text.
- Use links: Please provide URLs to articles wherever possible. Avoid cutting and pasting whole articles, especially considering the fact that not everyone may be interested.
- Don't include large attached files: Instead of including large attachments, please upload your file to a server and post a link to the file from your email message.
Do Not Hijack Threads
- Post new questions or new topics as new threads (new email message). Please do not reply to a random thread with a new question or start an unrelated topic of conversation in an existing thread. This creates confusion and makes it much less likely that you will get a response.
Subscribers Only
- Only subscribers can post to our mailing lists. If you would like to contribute to our mailing lists, we think it is only fair that you be a subscriber. Note: If you want to participate only occasionally, you can subscribe to a list and set your email options to digest or no mail and read the web archives when you want to catch up.
- To reduce spam, we may moderate posts from new mailing list users. If your message doesn’t appear right away, please be patient and give us a little time to respond to the list moderation requests.
Recipients
- Always reply to the mailing list (not the individual) when answering questions. In many cases, one person will post the question and several others will be silently waiting to see the answer on the list. This also helps avoid repeat questions because others can search the mailing list to get answers.
- Always group-reply to a message. Some of the email recipients might not be subscribed, might have turned off email delivery, or may read list messages with lower priority than messages addressed to them directly. For the same reasons, it is advisable to add relevant people to the recipient list explicitly.
Credit to the Puppet Labs Community Guidelines and Code of Conduct which subsequently credits the Fedora Mailing List Guidelines as a starting point under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
You can log bug reports and support tickets for SIMP using our ticketing system. In order to cut down on ticket spam, the tracker requires you to register and log in before the “New issue” link appears in the UI.
Here are a few guidelines that apply specifically to our bug tracker:
- Each bug report is for only one issue. If you find several issues, please separate them into several reports.
- Do a search before you file a bug, and try to avoid filing duplicates by taking a look at whether your issue has already been filed before.
- Don't start endless debates on topics not directly related to the scope of a specific bug report. We have mailing lists and other places for longer discussions.
- Avoid quoting complete previous comments by stripping unneeded lines.
- Please double check to make sure that the information you are including is public (not confidential), especially in attached log files or screenshots. * This is a cloud hosted service so, while we can put in a request, sensitive information may take some time to be removed from the tracker.
- If you want to contribute code, you might want to start with a discussion on the mailing list to make sure that what you want to submit is a good idea or architected in a way that will be useful for others.
- Look at existing pull requests to make sure that you aren’t duplicating effort.
- Review any existing CONTRIBUTING.* files associated with the project.
- If you are new to git or GitHub, you might find these resources useful:
Credit to Puppet Labs Community Guidelines and Code of Conduct (from which we borrowed the original file), 01.org and meego.com, since they formed the starting point for many of these guidelines.
These documents belong to the community and are licensed under the Creative Commons. You can help improve them!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
