Code of Conduct

Preamble

OBS is made up of many people from all over the world, with different backgrounds and experiences that they bring to the project. In order to continue letting the community grow, feel safe, and to encourage good communication, we are adopting the following Code of Conduct. This document—or any subsequent version—will be enforced from July 31st, 2021 onwards.

Scope

This Code of Conduct applies to anyone who contributes—or wishes to contribute—to the project directly, is taking part in community discussion in official channels, or are in a position where they’ll be seen as a representative of the project, regardless of whether they intend to speak for the project or not.

A person is considered to be representing the project if they’re speaking as a code contributor, support volunteer, member involved with the project, or if they have some kind of visible role in an official channel for OBS. This does not include roles for Sponsors or Patrons.

Official channels for OBS include the Discord server, the forum, any GitHub repositories within the OBS Project organization, any social media accounts for OBS Project, any public events where OBS Project has a presence, any presentations given on behalf of OBS Project, or any other situation that can be reasonably interpreted as being hosted, attended or communicated by the OBS Project.

This Code of Conduct is subject to change, and any changes will have a 2 week notice period before taking immediate effect. Changes will not be enforced retroactively unless it directly affects the security, safety or well-being of another individual, or other exceptional circumstances.

Guidelines

General

• We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.
• Please avoid using overtly sexual aliases or other nicknames that might detract from a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all.
• Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude.
• Respect that people will have differences of opinion.
• We will exclude you from interaction if you insult, demean or harass anyone. That is not welcome behavior. The definition of harassment is provided in the section on Unacceptable Behavior. In particular, we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people in socially marginalized groups. This includes private harassment.
• Likewise any spamming, trolling, flaming, baiting or other attention-stealing behavior is not welcome.
• Being a recognized Contributor, Support Volunteer, Sponsor or Patron does not give you special right to avoid following these guidelines when taking part in community discussions.

Code Contributors

• Respect that every design or implementation choice carries a trade-off and numerous costs. There is seldom a right answer.
• Please keep unstructured critique to a minimum. If you have solid ideas you want to experiment with, make a fork and see how it works.
• Do not post negative or inflammatory comments on code submissions. If you believe that a code submission has problems, provide constructive or actionable feedback, or a reason for why a submission is being rejected. Where it is possible, provide explanations that someone can use to fix things.

Support Volunteers

• There are many users of differing skill levels or abilities. This is never a reason to refuse support for someone, as long as it’s within the scope of OBS support, and the user is willing to cooperate.
• Just because something seems obvious to you, doesn’t mean it’s actually obvious. If someone is having difficulty understanding how to use OBS, it should never be treated as their fault.
• Bad advice is often worse than no advice. If you don’t know how to address someone’s issue, then get ahold of someone who’ll be able to provide them help. We can only expect so much patience from a user asking for support, and helping without understanding the problem only results in using up that patience.

Unacceptable Behavior

The following behaviors are considered harassment and are unacceptable within our community:

• Violence, threats of violence or violent language directed against another person.
• Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
• Posting or displaying sexually explicit or violent material.
• Posting or threatening to post other people’s personally identifying information ("doxing").
• Personal insults.
• Unwelcome sexual attention. This includes, sexualized comments or jokes, and unwelcome sexual advances.
• Deliberate intimidation, stalking or following.
• Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.

Enforcement

Instances of unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting an enforcement team member at one of the following addresses: coc@obsproject.com. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated, and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident. Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.

In other cases where behavior is against the general guidelines set out in this Code of Conduct, this may be brought up with a moderator through either a Discord DM, or through an email to an enforcement member. In these cases, it is always assumed in the first instance that a person means well, and action will only be taken in the case of repeated failure to follow the guidelines.

Feedback

Suggestions for changes can be made by submitting a pull request on the obsproject/obs-studio repo, or if you wish to privately discuss your concerns, you can instead email coc@obsproject.com.

Attribution

This Code of Conduct is adapted in part from the Contributor Covenant, version 1.4, in part from the Citizen Code of Conduct (used under CC-BY-SA 3.0), and in part from the Rust Code of Conduct.

This Code of Conduct is released and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Version History

V1.0 - First Iteration - July 31st, 2021