Community Guidelines

Note: Highlighted items require links to be added. Dawn will add links as those pages become available.

Overview

We want to keep the Yocto Community a great place to participate, but we need your help to keep it that way. While we have specific guidelines for various tools, in general, you should:

Be nice

• Be courteous and polite to fellow members of the list:
• Respect other people: No regional, racial, gender or other abuse will be tolerated.

Keep it clean

• Keep the language clean (no swearing)

Keep it legal

• Make sure that you have the legal right to post your content and are not violating copyright or other laws.
• All community contributions are also subject to our Terms of Service

Read Before Posting - Helping Yourself

Search for existing answers

IMPORTANT: Before you contribute, be sure that you have done a thorough search to see if your question has already been answered. We've already answered many questions, and you will get a better response from people if you have already done your due diligence to find obvious or partial answers.

• Search this wiki
• Search our mailing lists
• Search the yoctoproject.com website

Mailing List Guidelines

Keep It Short

Remember that thousands of copies of your message will exist in mailboxes:

• Keep your messages as short as possible.
• Avoid including log output (select only the most relevant lines, or place the log on a website or in a pastebin instead)
• Don't excessively quote previous messages in the thread (trim the quoted text down to the most recent/relevant messages only).

Use Proper Posting Style

• No HTML or Rich Text: Set your mailer to send only plain text messages to avoid getting caught in our spam filters.
• Do not top post: Top posting is replying to a message on "top" of the quoted text of the previous correspondence. This is highly unwanted in mailing lists because it increases the size of the daily digests to be sent out & is highly confusing and incoherent. By default, most email clients top post. Please, remove the irrelevant part of the previous communication(in case of more than a single correspondence) and use bottom, interleaved posting.
• Using interleaved posting: Bottom, interleaved posting is 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 all may not be interested.
• Don't include attached files: Instead of including attached files, please upload your file to the MeeGo wiki 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.

Do Not Cross Post

Avoid posting to multiple lists simultaneously. Pick a mailing list that is most suitable for your post and just use that. CC'ing multiple lists should be avoided.

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. Please note that 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.

Additional Resources

• Mailing list guidelines by Shakthi Kannan (PDF): Great guideline summary and examples of posting styles.

Guideline Violations - 3 Strikes Method

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 making our community an unpleasant place.

• First occurrence: Public reminder that the behavior is inappropriate according to our guidelines.
• Second occurrence: Private message warning the user that any additional violations will result in removal from the community.
• Third occurrence: Depending on the violation, may include account deletion or banning.

Notes:

• Obvious spammers are banned on first occurrence. This is necessary to keep the community free of spam.
• Violations are forgiven after 6 months of good behavior.
• Minor formatting / style infractions will be dealt with through education, not the 3 strikes process.
• Extreme violations of a threatening, abusive, destructive or illegal nature will be addressed immediately and are not subject to 3 strikes.
• Contact Dawn Foster to report abuse or appeal violations (mistakes happen & will be corrected).

Credits

• MeeGo Community Guidelines were the basis for the Yocto Guidelines used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
• Fedora Mailing List Guidelines used as a starting point under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.