Frontend Mentor community guidelines

Frontend Mentor is a community where people from all over the world can come to improve their coding skills, meet like-minded people, collaborate, and help each other get better.

We aim to build the most supportive web development community around. To do this, we need the community's help to ensure everyone feels welcome, supported, and safe.

Below, we've outlined our general Code of Conduct, a base expectation of behaviour on any channels related to Frontend Mentor. Below the Code of Conduct, we've outlined more specific guidelines for the learning platform and our Discord community.

Code of Conduct

All participants of Frontend Mentor are expected to abide by our Code of Conduct, both online and during in-person events that are hosted and/or associated with Frontend Mentor.

The Pledge

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we pledge to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

The Standards

Examples of behaviour that contributes to creating a positive environment include:

• Using welcoming, inclusive, positive, and supportive language in your interactions.
• Answering questions and supporting others wherever possible.
• Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.
• Gracefully accepting constructive criticism.
• Referring to people by their preferred pronouns and using gender-neutral pronouns when uncertain.

Examples of unacceptable behaviour by participants include:

• Being rude or overly critical of a solution or the code within it.
• Knowingly trying to scam other community members. For example, approaching people to share an Upwork/Fiverr account.
• Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, public or private harassment.
• Publishing others' confidential information, such as a physical or electronic address, without explicit permission.
• Promoting any content that is overtly political or can be construed as pushing a political agenda.
• Not being respectful to reasonable communication boundaries, such as 'leave me alone,' 'go away,' or 'I'm not discussing this with you.'
• The usage of sexualised language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or advances.
• Swearing, usage of strong or disturbing language.
• Displaying graphic content you know may be considered disturbing.
• Assuming or promoting any kind of inequality, including but not limited to: age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, nationality and race, personal appearance, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
• Drug promotion of any kind.
• Other conduct you know could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting.

Platform guidelines

Our platform is where community members can start challenges, submit solutions, and give feedback to others. The following are some guidelines about which behaviours are encouraged and which ones to avoid:

Please do

• Give high-quality, specific feedback on other people's solutions — A big part of the learning that happens on Frontend Mentor is reading other people's code, analysing it, and then giving feedback. Professional developers read other people's code all the time, so using Frontend Mentor to practice this is a brilliant learning tool.
• Upvote comments to say "thanks" or agree with what's been said — Upvoting on Frontend Mentor has a couple of meanings. The first is for the solution author to say a quick "thanks". This is especially useful for comments complimenting the solution but offering no additional helpful feedback. Secondly, upvotes are a way for other community members to agree with what someone has said on someone else's solution.
• Mark comments as helpful if they answer your question(s) or teach you something new — The "Mark as helpful" button allows the solution author to acknowledge a comment that helped them improve their solution or learn a new coding concept or paradigm. Marking a comment as helpful awards points to the commenter, so it should be reserved for when someone has offered genuinely helpful feedback.

Please don't

• Plagiarise other people's work — Frontend Mentor is all about building projects and learning by doing. Sometimes, it can help to see how other people have tackled a problem when you're trying to find a solution. Taking inspiration from other people's projects for specific code snippets is fine. However, please avoid plagiarising other people's projects by submitting other people's solutions as your own. If you are found to have plagiarised someone else's work, you could be immediately banned from Frontend Mentor. The caveat to this is following a YouTube tutorial for a challenge, which is fine. However, we recommend mentioning that you followed a tutorial and giving credit to the instructor.
• Spam comments that offer no helpful feedback — It's nice to motivate others. But, please refrain from posting short comments like "Nice work!" and "You've done a great job!" repeatedly without offering additional helpful feedback. If you are seen to be spamming comments, you risk having your account flagged (see Enforcement section below).
• Ask people to mark your comment as helpful — A big part of Frontend Mentor is helping each other out and providing feedback. If you give some feedback, please avoid saying things like, "if you found this feedback useful, please mark this comment as helpful". It places unnecessary pressure on the solution author to mark your comment as helpful, which is best avoided. Feel free to say something like, "I hope you find this helpful", but please avoid asking for your comment to be marked as helpful outright.
• Copy/paste the same minimal feedback on multiple solutions — Offering feedback on solutions can greatly help the solution author. However, please avoid repeatedly copy/pasting the same canned feedback on numerous solutions. Offering a single improvement like "add a main tag" or "add a h1 heading" and spamming the same advice on multiple solutions is not helpful. It also skews the points system because invariably, some of these comments will be marked as helpful, awarding the commenter points. This is a common tactic to "farm points", resulting in high positions on the Wall of Fame. If you are seen doing this, you risk having your account flagged (see Enforcement section below) and losing your points.
• Submit solutions for incorrect challenges — Please only submit solutions for the challenge the solution is intended for. For example, a solution to the QR Code Component challenge should only be submitted as a solution for that challenge. Submitting a solution for a different challenge will lead to your solution being deleted.

Discord community guidelines

Our Discord community provides a space where community members can communicate in real-time. It's a perfect place to ask for help on challenges, feedback, share resources, and chat with other developers. The following are some guidelines about which behaviours are encouraged and which ones to avoid:

Please do

• Welcome new members in the introductions channel — As mentioned in the introduction, our goal is for Frontend Mentor to be the most welcoming, supportive web development community around. A vital part of this is ensuring all new members who introduce themselves are welcomed with a message. Please feel free to jump in and welcome new members. This could either be through a reply to their message or a simple wave 👋
• Answer questions and support others wherever possible — We're all here to learn and improve, so please support others wherever you can. Helping others has the bonus of reinforcing your own knowledge, so by helping others, you're also helping yourself learn more!
• Post a single message in the most appropriate channel — If you want to post a message in Discord, please choose the most appropriate channel based on the topic. Please post a single message once you've found the most appropriate channel. Posting lots of individual, single-sentence messages can be frustrating for other members.
• Share useful resources you find online — If you read a helpful article or discover a great resource, it would be great if you shared it in the resources channel for others to see. By sharing resources, you're helping others learn more and discover excellent content from across the web.

Please don't

• Send unsolicited DMs to other community members — The Discord community is specifically there to help community members communicate about code and web development in real time. It's not a dating app or somewhere to message people without getting their permission first. If someone has said in a public channel that they’re happy for you to DM them, then that’s fine. But please respect other people's boundaries.
• Ask people to share subscriptions to Frontend Mentor or any other services — Sharing subscriptions will often go against the terms and conditions of service. So we don't allow messages asking to share paid resources. If someone asks you to share your PRO subscription, please inform us.
• Ask people to share design files for Frontend Mentor challenges — Sharing design files is against our terms, so please don’t do it or ask others to share them with you. The design files are part of our PRO subscription, so please subscribe if you would like to access them.
• Copy/paste the same message throughout multiple channels — Spamming the same message in various channels is hugely frustrating for other community members. Admins will remove all duplicates anyway, so it doesn't serve any purpose other than to annoy the rest of the community and cause more work for the admins. Please be considerate and post a single message in the most appropriate channel.
• Post jobs — All job posts will be removed. Unfortunately, we had issues with scammers posting jobs, so we decided to remove them altogether to protect the community. Please check out our Hiring Platform if you’re looking to hire developers from the Frontend Mentor community.
• Advertise yourself as available for work — Similar to the item above, people who advertised themselves as looking for work were sometimes targeted by scammers. It also leads to lots of self-promotional messages, which creates noise in the channels. Any posts advertising yourself as available for work will also be removed.
• Advertise any products or services — Unless you are replying directly to another community member asking for a related resource, we don’t allow advertising of any products or services in our community. This helps keep messages on-topic and protects against spam posts.
• Post overly self-promotional messages — If you have written a helpful article or streamed yourself completing a challenge, feel free to share a link in the resources channel. But please avoid posting self-promotional messages that aren't intended to help the rest of the community.
• Post affiliate/referral links — All affiliate and referral links will be removed, so please refrain from posting them.
• Post political content — To maintain the primary focus of Frontend Mentor on web development and to ensure an inclusive community for all, we kindly ask our members to refrain from sharing, endorsing, or promoting any content that is overtly political or can be construed as pushing a political agenda. We believe that keeping our community free from political discussions will help prevent potential conflicts and distractions and ensure everyone feels welcome, irrespective of political beliefs.
• Approach other community members to share Upwork/Fiverr accounts or work under a shared name — This is a well-known scam in web development communities. If you message anyone in Discord intending to set up this kind of arrangement, your account will be immediately deactivated. If someone messages you with this type of proposition, please immediately report this to hi@frontendmentor.io with screenshots of your interaction.
• Try setting up project collaborations for non-Frontend Mentor projects — While teaming up with others on projects is something we wish to encourage, we can’t be sure that non-FEM collaboration requests are legitimate. So we’ve chosen to disallow them to help protect the community.
• Ask for money or equipment (e.g. a laptop) from the community — All messages asking for money or new equipment will be removed, so please refrain from posting them. We realise it might be a legitimate request, but we remove all posts of this type to avoid scams.
• Post surveys that collect personally identifiable information — Please feel free to post surveys that help you gain insights from the community. However, to protect our community from possible scams and data privacy issues, we ask that you don’t include fields to collect people’s names, email addresses, or any other personally identifiable information. Any survey posted that does try collecting this information will be removed.

Enforcement

Violations of the Code of Conduct, platform guidelines, or Discord community guidelines may be reported by emailing hi@frontendmentor.io. All reports will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances.

We hold the right and responsibility to remove comments or other contributions that are not aligned with our Code of Conduct or to ban temporarily or permanently any members for other behaviours that we deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful. While we investigate reports against an account, it may be "flagged". This means the individual will not be eligible to appear on the Wall of Fame, win badges, or earn any more points while their account remains flagged.

Community members who repeatedly perform actions that go against our Discord community guidelines risk being banned from our Discord community.

Attribution

We used the Code of Conduct Generator to create the Code of Conduct, which is adapted from dev.to.