Discuss Forum Guidelines

Overview of Discourse, it’s moderation capabilities and how they’re applied in the Kubernetes Forum, along with detailed instructions on requesting new categories.

Discuss guidelines

Discuss (discuss.kubernetes.io), is the Kubernetes community forum backed by the Discourse discussion platform. It serves as the primary communication platform for Kubernetes users; replacing the kubernetes-users mailing list in September 2018.

Discuss, like other Kubernetes communication platforms, is public and searchable. Communication should be polite and respectful. Follow the general guideline of “be excellent to each other”.

Reference Links:

Code of conduct

Kubernetes adheres to the Kubernetes Code of Conduct throughout the project, and includes all communication mediums.

Privacy Policy

Discuss adheres to the the Linux Foundation Privacy Policy.

Admins

To connect: please reach out to them using Discourse’s built in message system. If there is an issue with the platform itself, please use the sig contributor experience mailing list or the #sig-contribex slack channel.

General communication guidelines

PM (Private Message) conversations

Please do not engage in proprietary company specific conversations in the Kubernetes Discourse instance. This is meant for conversations around related Kubernetes open source topics and community. Proprietary conversations should occur in one of your company communication platforms. As with all communication, please be mindful of appropriateness, professionalism, and applicability to the Kubernetes community.

Escalating and/or reporting a problem

Discourse has a built in system for flagging inappropriate posts that will notify the admins of a potentially bad post or conversation. If the post occurred during a period where one of the Admins may not be available, reach out to one of the moderators in the closest timezone directly. As a moderator, they can flag the post which will unlist it immediately until an Admin is available to review it.

If there is an issue in one of the Regional Boards, engage with one of the Regional moderators as a first step. They will be able to add context and aid in the escalation process.

If the problem is with one of the Admins or Moderators, reach out to one of the other Admins and describe the situation.

If it is a [Code of Conduct] issue, contact conduct@kubernetes.io and describe the situation.

Moderation

Discourse has a built in set of advanced auto-moderation capabilities that rely on their "user trust system". For example, newly created accounts are rate limited on posting or replying to topics until their “trust level” increases. A user’s trust level will increase based on a number of factors including time spent on the forum, posts or replies made, likes received, or one of several other metric.

Moderators, both those for the General Forum and Regional Board are manually promoted by an Admin to Trust Level 4. With that comes the full responsibilities of a board moderator.

Moderator expectations and guidelines

Moderators should adhere to the general Kubernetes project moderation guidelines.

Other moderator responsibilities

Ingest queue

Moderators have access to a private category called “Ingest” that has topics posted automatically from a variety of Kubernetes/CNCF sources such as Kubernetes releases, Security Announcements, the kubernetes.io blog, and other useful sources such as Last Week in Kubernetes Development (LWKD). Moderators are encouraged to tag and move these articles to their relevant category.

New category requests

Requesting a general category

New category requests should be posted to the Site Feedback and Help section. Proposed Categories should be community focused and must be related to Kubernetes project. They must not be Company specific with the exception of Cloud providers; however their topics should not be related to proprietary information of the provider.

Once a request has been made, you are encouraged to solicit user support for the category from the community. The admins will review the request, if two express their support for category, it will be created.

Once created, the “About the Category” should be updated with a brief description of the newly created category.

Requesting a SIG, WG, or sub-project category

If you are associated with a SIG, WG or subj-project and would like a Discuss category to collaborate with others asynchronously; post a message with the category creation request to the Site Feedback and Help section. An admin will reach out and provide you with a URL and mail address to use for your discussions.

Requesting a regional category

The Regional Discussions Category is intended for those users that belong to a specific region or share a common language to openly interact and connect with each other in their native language.

The anti-spam and anti-harassment features built into Discourse do not handle other languages as well as it does English. It can pick up on general spam but lacks regional context. For this reason, the Regional categories require additional native-language moderators.

To request the creation of a new Regional board, post the request the top level Regional Discussions Category. If possible solicit additional support from the regional community and propose potential moderators. Before a Regional Board can be created, there must be at least one moderator, preferably two with at least one in the Region’s primary time zone.

Once moderators have been selected, the Regional category can be created.

The first post of the new board “About the Category” post should contain the following text in both english and the region’s language:

Welcome to the <region> category of the Kubernetes Forum! In here you can chat
and discuss topics of interest to you about Kubernetes in [region language].
This is a place to share Kubernetes related news, projects, tools, blogs and
more. This site is governed by the [CNCF Code of Conduct], and we are committed
to making this a welcoming place for all. If you have any specific questions or
concerns, please contact one of the moderators for the <region> category listed
below.

**Moderator Team:**
- <moderator 1>
- <moderator 2>

[CNCF Code of Conduct]: <Translated CNCF Code of Conduct>

The “CNCF Code of Conduct” link should be linked to one of the translated versions of the CNCF Code of Conduct. If none is available, create an issue under the CNCF foundation project requesting the new translation, and link to the English version until a translated version is made available.

Lastly, update the discuss admins section in the moderators.md list with the new region, the moderators and their timezone.