How to Contribute

Did you know that according to the popular 1% rule, only 1% of the users of an internet community add content, while the other 99% of the users only consume content? However there is plenty ways to contribute and to help your favorite project to flourish, even without writing code. As follows are some examples on ways to contribute.

Reporting issues

Why shouldn't I report issues in the community chats?

Reporting issues in the community chats is actually a bad idea for multiple reasons:

• Development takes place in platforms such as GitLab, sourcehut and Github with a certain procedure (issue reports, commits, linking to the issues and marking them solved). Chat reports are not a part of that procedure.
• Talking about an issue and workarounds carries the discussion further away from the actual development and leads to discussions in forums and chatrooms, in contrast to bug trackers.
• Shared and accepted workarounds don't find their way back into the code and may be accepted as "tolerable evil".
• Bug reports in chats are getting scrolled out, repeated and as a result get annoying for everyone involved and leads to future users with the same or similar issues not getting helped anymore.
• It is expected that people mentioning issues also report them. Chatting about them without reporting them makes everyone think it is reported already and then the issue will never be reported (and therefore not fixed).
• The transition from community to developer are fluent, we don't have situations of "they above" versus the "we the users, who have to help themselves" here, like other commercial projects have. Don't even think about trying to bring such mindsets into the community.