Our community caters to a very diverse set of people, with quite a few different experiences, identities and mindsets. In order to promote a friendly, welcoming and safe community environment, we've come up with a list of rules.
Consider the below list a summary — the reasoning behind each rule (and how it should be interpreted) will be provided afterwards.
- Follow Discord's Terms of Service and Community Guidelines
- Use English if possible
- Treat all users with patience and respect, and consider other people's personal circumstances (e.g. epilepsy, identity, plurality, PTSD, culture, race, sexuality, etc)
- Communicate in an appropriate and non-discriminatory manner, and don't provoke or harass others
- Don't mention (aka ping) other users to draw attention to your support requests, or to be hostile/annoying
- Keep all projects legal and appropriate, and follow licensing requirements — for example, no piracy, malware or troll projects, and all code examples must avoid sexual and discriminatory language
- Follow the given topics and guidelines for each channel
- Do not mention names from MCP, Mojang or other proprietary mappings, even if you use spoilers
- Listen to and cooperate with the staff team
Our ruleset is based on our Code of Conduct. We also recommend giving that a quick read.
As the majority of our community is on Discord, we require that everyone follows Discord's rules and guidelines. For more information, see the Discord Terms of Service and the Discord Community Guidelines.
Like many large Discord communities, we try to set a good example through creating a friendly, inclusive and welcoming environment, so following Discord's rules is an absolute must.
While we recognise that many people are not native English speakers, our entire staff team does speak English — so, in order for us to be able to moderate, you'll also need to try your best to speak English.
It's okay if you're not great at English, or you use a translation tool — we won't make fun of you. Just give it your best shot!
Treat all users with patience and respect, and consider other people's personal circumstances (e.g. epilepsy, identity, plurality, PTSD, culture, race, sexuality, etc)
The internet (and the world in general) is a big place, and it's filled with many types of people — all with their own experiences, bodies, memories and thought processes. It's important to take this fact into consideration when you're communicating with people, especially in public spaces. For example, consider the following points:
- A user may be a member of a cultural, racial, societal, identity-related or other minority, so you should be welcoming towards those groups instead of making them feel uncomfortable or undesired.
- A user may be suffering from a mental illness that affects their behaviour in the community, so you should try to be patient with other users and step away from Discord if you start feeling angry or heated.
- A user may have epilepsy or another photosensitive disorder, so you should not post flashing images or videos to avoid causing intense pain or seizures for people with those disorders.
- A user may have grown up in a different country or culture from you, so you should avoid using slang or other terms that may be considered offensive.
- A user may not have the experience or knowledge that you do, so you should avoid making fun of them or implying that they are less intelligent. Instead, work with them to improve their understanding of the concept in question.
- A user may simply have different preferences to you — for example, enjoying a different edition of Minecraft or using a different editor — and you should not make fun of them or put them down for this.
- Not everyone is a native English speaker. While it's OK to correct someone to try to help them to improve their language skills, you should not use this as an excuse to make fun of someone.
- Some people have preferred pronouns other than what your assumptions might say. It's safest to default to "they" if you don't know someone's pronouns — you can always switch once you learn what they are.
- Similarly, if you have preferred pronouns and someone gets them wrong then we do expect at least a little patience — sometimes people are forgetful, or they may not be used to using the pronouns you prefer. We will act on people that intentionally misgender you, of course — but we'll need to take the entire situation into account.
There are many things to consider, and you should be prepared to apologise and change your behaviour when someone calls you out on something you did that hurt them. Being nice is always the easiest, most rewarding path, with the least friction.
Communicate in an appropriate and non-discriminatory manner, and don't provoke or harass others
The moderation team wishes to create a friendly community that welcomes all kinds of voices from all over the world. As previously mentioned, that means you're going to interact with all kinds of people — and your behaviour around them will directly impact their comfort in our community, and their experience of it.
Much of the below will be common sense (and is present in the Discord Community Guidelines), but here's a non-exhaustive list of behaviours we do not welcome:
- The sexualisation of code (including small examples), the use of sexualised language or imagery, or sexual attention or advances of any kind
- Trolling, insults, derogatory comments, personal or political attacks, attacks on someone's personal preference or choices, threats of violence or violent acts towards others, dead-naming or deliberate misgendering
- Public or private harassment, or publishing others' private information without their permission
- Spamming or unwanted self-promotion
- Encouraging other people to bend or break the rules, or attempting to bend or skirt the rules yourself
- Circumventing (via technical measures or otherwise) the moderation tools that have been put in place
At the end of the day, everyone has a right to considerate and respectful communication within our community spaces — and we will act on anyone acting contrary to that concept.
Don't mention (aka ping) other users to draw attention to your support requests, or to be hostile/annoying
Discord's @mentions system is an extremely useful tool, when used correctly. There are many situations where it's appropriate to use it to get someone's attention, but we discourage the following uses:
- Deliberately mentioning someone when they've asked you to stop doing so
- Over-mentioning (for example, mentioning someone every single time you address them in a message)
- Attempting to get the attention of staff for support requests (either in the
#player-supportchannel or themod-devchannels)
There's a lot of nuance to consider when deciding whether to mention someone. In general, if someone asks you not to mention them in a specific concept then you should listen to them and change your behaviour.
Additionally, you are able to mention the @Moderator role. We ask that you only use this to report problems that are unfolding in public channels and need the attention of a moderator. We will not be upset if the situation ultimately does not need moderation, but it is not appropriate to use this mention to — for example — harass staff members, spam, or draw staff attention to your programming issue.
Keep all projects legal and appropriate, and follow licensing requirements — for example, no piracy, malware or troll projects, and all code examples must avoid sexual and discriminatory language
This rule is fairly self-explanitory, but we expect all of your projects to be both legal and appropriate. Although this isn't an exhaustive list, the following is unacceptable:
- Projects that break the Minecraft EULA
- Projects that enable piracy
- Projects that contain malicious code, including code that targets specific players
- Projects that make use of unlicensed (ARR) code from other projects, or otherwise break software licenses from other projects
- Projects or code examples that contain sexualised or discriminatory language, including in variable names or folder/package structure
- Projects that promote discrimination or real-life violence
- Projects that don't otherwise violate this rule, but deliberately mask or hide their intentions (troll projects) — this doesn't include bugs, easter eggs or projects that exist to mess with players, as long as the projects are clear about their intentions
In general, anything that would break another rule if used in casual conversation is not allowed in your code. We expect project maintainers to be professional, respectful and non-discriminatory in their code and interactions.
All of our channels exist for a specific reason. When chatting in any of the channel, your discussions should match the topic the channel was created for. It's pretty normal for conversations to drift off-topic after a while, but the people in that conversation are responsible for moving it to one of the general channels when that happens.
To help you understand what each channel is for, please see our channel guide. You can also look at the description given for each channel on Discord.
Do not mention names from MCP, Mojang or other proprietary mappings, even if you use spoilers
When writing code, you tend to give your variables, methods, classes and packages descriptive names — so that you know what they do at a glance. When Mojang released Minecraft, the included names were obfuscated (erased or masked), which makes it difficult to know what everything is for. Mappings exist to solve this problem, by taking Mojang's obfuscated names and translating them to something useful for mod developers.
The Fabric project is home to Yarn, a free, open-source alternative to proprietary Minecraft mapping projects. In order to ensure the legal security of Yarn's contributors, we require that proprietary names aren't talked about within our communities. This includes (but is not limited to) the following mappings:
- Forge/MCP mappings
- Mojang's own licensed mappings
- Spigot/Paper's mappings
If you're not sure about a name, then it may be best to avoid referring to it. When referring to proprietary mappings, discussion of the following is entirely disallowed within our community spaces:
- Class names
- Method names
- Package names
- Variable names
- Comments
- What the equivalent Yarn name is for something in Forge/MCP, or other proprietary mappings
If you're stuck on the last point, you may wish to look into projects like Devoldefy and Linkie (the Discord bot).
On the other hand, if you do need to discuss something relating to proprietary mappings then you are allowed to post a link to an external source — for example, a GitHub project — under the following conditions:
- You make it clear that the page or project you're linking to contains mentions of proprietary mappings
- You surround the link with
||spoiler markup||or<non-embedding markup>
There is no allowable way to work around or bypass this rule. You may not post these names in an image or using a spoiler. You are also not allowed to discuss how proprietary mappings projects don't do things.
Following this rule is essential to secure a future for the Yarn project, and we'll be moderating it quite strictly. That said, it's worth noting that not all moderators are familiar with all the proprietary names out there, and we often don't have a reference for the names you're using — this means that we may occasionally contact you regarding a name that is, in fact, not proprietary. While we'll do our best to avoid this, nobody's perfect and this is a tricky thing to enforce, so please be patient with us.