Community Guidelines & Code of Conduct

Be kind  

Be courteous, respectful, and polite to fellow community members. Be conscious of the words and phrases you choose when communicating with others. Harassment and other exclusionary or prejudicial behavior are not acceptable and will not be tolerated. This includes, but is not limited to:  

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, mental health, neurodiversity, national origin or citizenship.
• Posting sexually explicit content or violent material in public spaces.
• Real or implied violence, intimidation, oppression.
• Stalking, following, harassing photography or recording.
• Sustained disruption of talks or other events.
• Unwelcome physical contact.
• Publishing others’ private information (such as a physical or email address) without their explicit permission (a.k.a. ‘doxing’).
• Persistent misuse of pronouns.
• Unwelcome sexual attention.
• Suggestive language.
• Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.  

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. This includes the proper use of pronouns, inclusive language, and creating a welcoming environment for new members to our community. Avoid using phrases that have regional or cultural meanings that may not be understood by other members of our global community. Be aware that your first language may not be the first language of those you are communicating with.

Be respectful

When offering suggestions, whether in online discussions or as comments on a pull request, you should always use welcoming and inclusive language. Be open to differing viewpoints and the fact that others may not have the same experiences you do. Offer suggestions for improvement, rather than focusing on mistakes. If you feel yourself getting frustrated, take a step back and refocus on how to continue in a constructive manner.

Respect the legal rights of others

Perforce and the Puppet community operate across a global scale that crosses multiple legal jurisdictions. What may be acceptable in one part of the world might be restricted in another. To reduce your likelihood of violating regulations, please share only content that you own, do not share private or sensitive information, and don’t break the law. Where disputes exist on the legality of an activity due to conflicting regional interpretations, the laws of the State of Delaware, in the United States, will apply.

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 do harm to our community. Extreme violations of a threatening, abusive, destructive, or illegal nature will be addressed immediately and are not subject to 3 strikes.

1. First occurrence: We’ll give you a friendly, but public, reminder that the behavior is inappropriate according to our guidelines.
2. Second occurrence: We’ll send you a private message with a warning that any additional violations will result in removal from the community.
3. Third occurrence: Depending on the violation, we might need to delete or ban your account.

Notes:

• Obvious spammers are banned on first occurrence. If we don’t do this, we’ll have spam all over the place.
• 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 conduct@perforce.com 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

Puppet has a healthy community full of people who are happy to help you get unstuck, but the community works best if you know how it works. If you run into trouble with Puppet, these guidelines will make it easier for you to quickly get help.

Puppet has a relatively long history in the industry, so there is a ton of information returned from search engines for various problems. To narrow down your results to the most relevant, try these search tips:

1. Restrict your search to site:help.puppet.com. This disregards the old docs on puppet.com.
2. Join the puppet-users Google group and use the search box on the group page to search the mailing list. This eliminates duplicate hits from mailing list mirrors like Nabble, and lets you order results by date, so you aren’t confused by a bug that’s already fixed.
3. Use correct Puppet-specific terminology for your problem, like “yum provider”, “file resource”, and “manifest”. For help, see the glossary of Puppet vocabulary.

In general, we suggest searching the documentation site or browsing from the front page of the docs.

We also provide various commercial services around Puppet — including training, professional services, support, and certification — for people who want a little extra hands-on help.

If you can’t solve a problem on your own, there are a lot of places where you can get help from (and help!) your fellow community members. The sections below cover the norms and expectations in each area of the Puppet community.

Slack

A great place to get real-time help with Puppet is the Puppet Community Slack, which features a wide variety of channels on different topics and a vibrant community of users.

Be aware that our community channels are not official support channels; they’re an ad-hoc group of people (some of whom work on Puppet for a living) self-organizing to help each other out. If you do not receive an answer to your question that doesn’t mean you are out of options, the software is hopelessly broken, or your problem is insoluble. It just means you need to keep troubleshooting.

Some additional conduct guidelines:

• Be kind: Treat people with respect and consideration.
• Be helpful: Be patient with new people and be willing to jump in to answer questions.
• Communicate with empathy: 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. When posting, also consider how your message might be misinterpreted and take care with your words.
• Avoid posting large chunks: Use Slack’s built in code posting mechanism, pastebin, gists, or other similar services to shorten it to a link.
• Be patient: Folks might not be around when you ask a question, so wait a while for someone to be able to help.
• Search first: Your question might not be new or you might be able to find someone who has already asked or answered your question.
• Avoid private messages where possible: Ask permission before you send someone a private message/ direct message. Not everyone likes them. Also, by keeping it in public, others with similar issues can see the solution you were given.

Mailing list guidelines

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.

Puppet community mailing lists

• Puppet-Users: For any and all Puppet discussion.
• Puppet-Announce (read-only): A list for announcements related to Puppet, such as major version releases.

Search first

• Your question might not be new. Thoroughly search the mailing list archives (linked above) to see if it has been answered before.

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. However, if you are an active community member and you are personally hiring more people to work on Puppet, you may post relevant job descriptions.

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 (such as conferences and new releases) should be posted to multiple lists at the same time. When you post to multiple lists, please specify one list where people should reply with questions and put the other lists in the blind carbon copy (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 if lots of log output is required, use Slack’s built in code posting mechanism, or place the log in pastebin, gists, or a similar service and link to it.
• Don’t excessively quote previous messages in the thread. Trim the quoted text down to the most recent or relevant content only.

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.
• Do not “top post”. Use interleaved posting where possible: 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 not everyone may be interested.
• Don’t attach large 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 believe it is only fair that you become 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. 

Bug guidelines

You can log bug reports and support tickets for Puppet using our support portal. If you are not a customer with access to the support portal, you can file an issue on the GitHub repo of the product, module, or component where you found the issue. Here are a few guidelines that apply specifically to our support portal:

• Each issue report is for only one issue. If you find several issues, please separate them into several reports.
• For discussions, please use the customer forums, Slack, mailing lists, or GitHub issues instead of tickets in the support portal.
• Remove unnecessary lines when quoting other comments.
• Please include all necessary steps to reproduce the bug you are reporting.
• If at all possible, create a minimal test case to reproduce the bug. Remember that the more easily we can reproduce what you’re seeing, the more easily we can correct it.

Git repository guidelines

• Look at existing pull requests and issues to make sure that you aren’t duplicating effort.
• Review any existing CONTRIBUTOR.MD files associated with the project.
• If you are new to git or GitHub, you might find these resources useful:  GitHub help files, Git cheat sheets, and Git Reference documentation.

Forge/module guidelines

The Puppet Forge is a repository of modules, written and contributed by users, and we encourage you to publish your modules on the Forge.

• Start with the Publishing Modules document to learn how to publish your modules to the Puppet Forge.
• See the Module Fundamentals document for how to write and use your own Puppet modules.
• See the Installing Modules document for how to install pre-built modules from the Puppet Forge.
• See the Using Plugins document for how to arrange plugins (like custom facts and custom resource types) in modules and sync them to agent nodes.

Event code of conduct

Exhibitors, speakers, sponsors, staff, and all other attendees at events organized by Perforce or held at Perforce facilities are subject to these community guidelines and code of conduct. We are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, and we do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

We ask you to be considerate of others and behave professionally and respectfully to all other participants. Remember that sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any event venue, including talks. Participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event without a refund at the discretion of the organizers or Puppet staff members.

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, real or implied violence, intimidation, oppression, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, unwelcome physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the event organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the event with no refund. If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of the event staff immediately.

Event staff will be happy to help participants address concerns. All reports will be treated as confidential. We strongly encourage you to address your issues privately with any of our staff members who are organizing the event. We encourage you to avoid disclosing information about the incident until the staff have had sufficient time in which to address the situation. Please also keep in mind that public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. We do not condone nor participate in such actions.

You can alternatively contact conduct@perforce.com.

We expect all participants to follow these rules at all event venues and related social events.