# Community norms for unsolicited communication

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/community-norms-for-unsolicited-communication/7539>\
**Category:** Community\
**Created:** [December 5, 2017, 9:59am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/community-norms-for-unsolicited-communication/7539 "2017-12-05T09:59:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 19

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**Author:** ![ChrisRackauckas](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/chrisrackauckas/32/77_2.png) [@ChrisRackauckas](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ChrisRackauckas)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2017, 3:59pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/community-norms-for-unsolicited-communication/7539/19 "2017-12-07T15:59:20Z")

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I think that the main thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have control over the lives of open source maintainers. This is something that is quite unintuitive to a lot of people for some reason. A lot of people will specifically ask for help from maintainers all of the time. One of the worst things about this is that, many times people will seek out the maintainer of the library for questions which don’t require the maintainer at all (“how do views in Julia work?” in a private message, vaguely linking back to something said in package docs), which discourages others from answering simple questions and puts more burden on one person. But you have to remember, an open source maintainer is not your private support team! They have the ability to make decisions on my own whether your post/problem is worthy of my problem or time. If they choose to not respond to you, that sucks but it’s their call. (If you really want them to respond, offer them money or a paid vacation 😉). Remember open source maintenance is donating time.

Pinging a maintainer is you making the public determination of what is worthy of their time. It’s you taking the initiative and saying that they should respond. That’s fine, but you better be right 😄@Tamas_Papp gives a few rules that make it easy to be right:

> [@Tamas\_Papp](#):
>
> if someone is participating in a discussion that is still going on, give credit with @ and quote when relevant (eg I am referring to code someone wrote),
> 
> if the discussion has been dormant for a while, or the person’s post happened a long time ago, think twice about doing the above,
> 
> try not to @ someone out of the blue, just to bring them into the discussion, without a really strong reason. Only if an issue for the relevant package will not suffice and we have corresponded in the past (“know personally” unfortunately does not apply, I haven’t met anyone here personally. Should do a Julia event in Vienna or Budapest…).
> 
> give likes liberally when I agree with something or found it helpful. Likes don’t trigger e-mails.

Another thing to note is that different people have different tolerances to being randomly pinged. If you don’t know that about them, then you probably just shouldn’t do it.

BTW, I don’t know if everyone caught it but @mohamed82008 won this thread.

> [@Spawn-fetch usage](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/spawn-fetch-usage/7549/16):
>
> You might want to check the seemingly lovely [ParallelDataTransfer.jl](https://github.com/ChrisRackauckas/ParallelDataTransfer.jl) by @ChrisRackauckas (sorry for pinging you!)

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