No complaints policy

No complaints policy in open source

Photo by yours truly

I love the open source community, especially the React ecosystem. Most of the folks there are supernice and helping each other. But sometimes something goes wrong.

I value my time and even more I value my mental health. I want to continue contributing to open source and avoid burnout. I try to be nice and helpful to every user of my projects. But sometimes it’s hard.

Every time I see or feel that someone is complaining about my project or my actions, or any unhealthy behavior towards me or other users, I immediately lock the conversation, or even block the user. I see it as the only way to continue working on open source.

There are many ways you can make folks in the open source community happier:

• new feature specs (better than just ideas because they’re often not actionable);
• detailed easily reproducible bug reports;
• any maintenance help, like answering questions on GitHub, Stack Overflow or Twitter.
• bugfixes;
• new features;
• docs improvements.

Other people are experiencing similar issues:

• The Dark Side of Open Source by Karolina Szczur
• Dear JavaScript by James Kyle
• The Reality of Developer Burnout by Kenneth Reitz

Let’s keep this community healthy and friendly!

No complaints policy was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.