Hello Community! 
As you probably know, for as long as we had this forum we have been using the general forum rules for our community.
As great as these rules are, they are not Checkmk specific. We wanted to create a Code of Conduct that would fit Checkmk perfectly and represent our values not only in the forum but also in our GitHub and other resources.
With the Checkmk team we have drafted a new version of CoC (Code of Conduct): Checkmk specific and tackling specific practices we have in our community – let’s discuss and make them truly represent as many views of the members of the community as possible.
Here we go:
(updated on 18.10.2022 based on the suggestions below)
Checkmk Code of Conduct
What we do
Checkmk has a powerful and resilient community of people who want to make the best of monitoring practices. Ultimately, we have one shared goal: we want Checkmk to become even better, to grow and provide more opportunities in the best way possible. And it is not possible without you – the people of this community. You are Checkmk.
That is why it is so important to have a comfortable and positive atmosphere in our forum and other places where community gathers.
We want Checkmk to be a diverse, inclusive community, that listens to its users, appreciates ideas and provides help and where all of our “communicative services” are always OK and never critical. Let us keep this goal in mind as we cooperate.
We speak the language of cooperation – be it in English, German or any other language in which we can communicate. Checkmk was created in Germany and has many people who prefer to communicate in German. Please be respectful to the communicative choices of others but don’t hesitate to ask them or other to help out communicate in English.
When communicating, please always try to be guided by the values of respect, fairness, sensitivity and constructive criticism – remember our goals and that we all want the same thing – to make Checkmk stronger and more useful to everyone here.
The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.
Hard Rules
These values are the general guidelines but to avoid any misinterpretation or abuse of them we will state several hard noes:
- Racism, sexism and any other form of discrimination will not be tolerated in any circumstances. Let us respect each other. Any unique person can provide a unique perspective – that is why diversity is extremely important in any community that wants to thrive.
- No abuse or harassment in any way: this kind of behavior will make us lose two people: the abused person who will feel discouraged to speak out and the person who will be banned for not respecting other people and their views
- Misinformation. It is OK to be mistaken about something, but please do not share the information that you know is not true. Let us trust each other to do our best to provide good information and helpful advice
- Spam. We want to keep the community useful for Checkmk users, contributors and maintainers, so spammers will be blocked
- Personal attacks. Criticize ideas, not people
- Trolling. Respectful conversations will bring us a longer way than trolling or any other such behavior.
- Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
- Do not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission and do not expose any private information. This rule does not include direct links to the information, openly available on the internet, for example links to other forum topics, documentation, blog posts, etc.
People who cannot follow those hard noes might be temporarily suspended or banned from the community.
Good Practices
Here are a couple of things that align well with the values described at the beginning and that tell the community that you care.
Behavior to be encouraged:
- Searching for your issue in the forum before posting a topic. It might be so that others already resolved this, and we could have a win-win situation: you get your answer straight away and the community experts can spend more time on questions that are not resolved yet
- Contact moderators if you have any concerns or ideas. Just flag inappropriate behavior or contact the community manager.
- Take a look at Meta end Events categories. We want to create many opportunities for the community to cooperate and actively participate in the life of the forum, calls etc. Let’s build something great together!
- Mark the solution to your question so that anyone could see that the issue is resolved.
When you see bad behavior, do not feel bad to “flag” it. It will give the moderators a signal, and you will not waste your precious specialist time and energy on arguing with a person who does not share your professional values.
The goal of moderation is to keep the community civil and comfortable. That is why moderators can delete some posts or user accounts. On the other hand, moderators do not preview new posts, so it is always up to you to help us keep the community welcoming. Please also note that the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.
The current version of CoC is inspired by Discourse’s Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse
Please take a look and feel free to comment and discuss this version.
Let us make our community rules truly community-inspired!
