Grafana Labs Public Community Channels are Civilized Places for Public Discussion

Please treat this discussion forum (community.grafana.com) and our public Slack workspace (grafana.slack.com to log in & slack.grafana.com to join) with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules, merely aids to the human judgment of our community. Use these guidelines to keep this a clean, well-lighted place for civilized public discourse.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make our community channels great places for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Please spend some time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests. We always recommend that community members search our forums and documentation site for answers before posting

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But, remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

  • Name-calling.
  • Ad hominem attacks.
  • Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
  • Knee-jerk contradiction.

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for everyone. 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.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: favorites, bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

Let’s try to leave our park better than we found it.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

How to flag issues on our Discourse Forums (community.grafana.com)

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

How to flag issues on our Public Slack (grafana.slack.com)*
For issues on our public Slack workspace, please DM the moderators @SamCoren or @RichiH to bring it to their attention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. The moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

  • Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
  • Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
  • Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information. This also extends to private and direct messages.
  • Respect our community channels. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum and Slack channels. It can be frustrating not getting an immediate answer to your question or issue, however repeated posts complaining about a lack of response will count as spam.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

Remember that our Community forums and Community Slack are public and search engines index our forum discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

  • Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
  • Don’t submit the same question in seperate multiple topics - use tags.
  • Don’t post no-content replies.
  • Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
  • Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

When to Post in Community Forums vs Community Slack?

For help with open source Grafana or the Grafana Cloud free tier, please use the forums first.

The Grafana Labs Discourse forums serves as the official community-based support channel and knowledge base for open source Grafana users and free tier Grafana Cloud users. When you can not find an answer to your issue in documentation or our forums, we highly encourage you to post a new topic in the appropriate forums section first.

After posting a new topic on the forums, you can share a link to it on Slack. This helps Grafana community members in the future by making it easier to find answers to similar issues or questions when they go to search for it as our Slack workspace has a message retention limit. This means if you get an answer that addresses your issue on Slack will disappear and not benefit the community long-term. This is why members of the Grafana Labs team will prioritize answering technical community questions on the forums when bandwidth allows over the community Slack.

Feeling social? Need quick feedback on something your building? Want to meet other Grafana users? Use Slack.

Slack functions primarily as a social community channel for closer to “real-time” discussions and networking between community members. The Grafana Labs team will also use it to get more qualitative feedback around our open source projects and products. Developers of community built dashboard templates and plugins can also use it to share what they’re building. Slack is also used to connect the Grafana community during our virtual events such as GrafanaCONline or ObservabilityCON. Grafana Labs customers may also use it for private communications with their account teams as outlined in their service agreements.

Please be respectful when using Slack’s Direct Message (DM) functionality. Spamming unsolicited messages to Grafana Labs employees and community members for support will be viewed as a Code of Conduct violation if reported to our community moderators.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

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