About community management and moderation
GitHub provides a baseline code of conduct for everyone who uses GitHub. For more information, see GitHub Terms of Service and GitHub Community Guidelines.
GitHub also offers tools for repository maintainers to define and enforce higher standards of behavior in their own communities on GitHub.
Organization owners can specify organization members as moderators. This gives these members access to moderation features otherwise reserved for organization owners. For more information, see Managing moderators in your organization.
After you establish standards of behavior for your community, you can encourage a pleasant and productive environment by responding to disruptive behavior in a fast, fair way. Effective moderation builds trust within your community and helps contributors feel safe and welcome.
Tools for moderating your community
GitHub's tools streamline management and moderation tasks in your community without requiring extensive moderation experience.
As a repository maintainer, you can author guidelines for contributing to your project and share them in the project's repository. GitHub offers a community profile checklist to help you author and publish community health files. Potential contributors to your project can review the community profile checklist to learn about your community's standards and decide whether they want to contribute. For more information, see Setting up your project for healthy contributions.
When disruptive behavior occurs in your community, GitHub offers tools for applying your code of conduct and de-escalating conflict. For example, you can lock a conversation to defuse a heated interaction. For more information, see Moderating comments and conversations.
Contributors can always report disruptive content to GitHub Support. If you opt into reported content for a public repository in your organization, contributors can also report comments containing disruptive behavior directly to repository maintainers. For more information, see Managing reported content in your organization's repository.
Further reading
- Your Code of Conduct from the Open Source Guides
- Building Welcoming Communities from the Open Source Guides
- Leadership and Governance from the Open Source Guides