How to communicate

This is an unofficial specification of the rules, taboos and guide lines when using Minetest.

The Forum

The forum is the central place for "permanent" communication: http://forum.minetest.net

Please use IRC for temporary communication or chatter. Remember, the IRC channel is logged.

Note that most core developers hang out in IRC (in #minetest-dev), so discussing engine features in IRC is good idea (Log of #minetest-dev).

Be nice

• Manners don't cost anything.
• Remember that developers (core or modders) are all volunteers, and have no commitments. Don't fret if they take a while producing stuff.
• Be appropriate. You never know the age of people on the channel.
• Watch your language.

IRC

Chat flooding

Chat flooding is when you post large amounts of text in a little amount of time.

• Use a pastebin like the Ubuntu pastebin to paste text that is more than a few lines long (error logs, code snippets...).
• Stay on topic as much as possible.

Do not abuse the bots

• Do not use the bots for stuff you can do easily yourself (e.g. Google searching), unless it is for collaborative reasons.
• Do not overuse the bots (chat flooding).

Links

• Do not post links to innapropriate or malware-distribution sites.
• Do not post links to gruesome or otherwise disturbing images.

Mod Making

Working together and collaboration

Collaboration is encouraged. To let this happen:

• Have a non-restrictive license ("no commercial use" or "no derivative work" clauses should be avoided).
• Use GitHub or a similar site.

"Rip-offs" or identical mods

If you want to make a mod that has already been made (or make a copy of it), then make sure that it:

• has a new style/method of using.
• is quicker running, or has better code architecture.
• is not worth using or extending the old one because it is too slow, jumbled, bad code.

and not:

• just changes textures (create a texture pack instead)
• just copies the code and rebrands it.

GitHub

Contributing to Minetest

• Use feature branches. Modify history to make things cleaner.
• Make only a single feature per branch/patch (if you cram many together, you will need to separate them anyway before they can be included).