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Community guidelines for support requests

The platform support team’s mission is to help Vox Media PDTA build amazing tools, and to ensure that all of our users—editorial teams, partners, and audience members—have resources and support to use those tools successfully. In short: we’re here to help.

To help us help you, these community guidelines outline how we can best work together to resolve bugs and incorporate your feedback. We expect you’ll adhere to these guidelines when contacting us, including following these three rules:

  1. Share as much detail as you can.
  2. Be respectful.
  3. Use content warnings.

Share as much detail as you can

The more information you can provide about the issue you’re experiencing, the better we’ll be able to help. When reporting issues, it’s great to include:

  • What you were doing when the issue occurred—links are great here, as are screenshots, or details on any error messages you encountered.
  • Your environment—what operating system, device, and browser were you using? Knowing if something is happening on a phone, in Firefox, or only on your work computer, can help us reproduce issues and identify their underlying causes.
  • What steps you’ve tried—have you already cleared your cookies and your cache, or tried using a different browser or device? Let us know so we can speed up the troubleshooting process.
  • What your timeline is—if there’s an issue preventing you from publishing on a deadline, please let us know so we can prioritize appropriately.

If you don’t have all of that info, that’s ok—we still want to hear from you! When in doubt, more details about the issue you’re encountering are always welcome.

Be respectful

We get it: it’s always frustrating when something goes wrong, and difficult to take time out of your day to get help. We’re your partners in finding a solution. We’re committed to treating you with respect, and expect you’ll do the same.

We’re also committed to providing a safe environment for everyone. Please keep in mind that team members with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise may review your message in an effort to resolve an issue. Messages that include sexist, racist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory, derogatory, condescending, or profane content will not receive a response.

Use content warnings

Part of being respectful is giving us a heads up when you’re reporting an issue with something that contains sensitive, explicit, or otherwise difficult content or imagery.

Please provide a content warning when reporting issues with content that deals with violence, racism, misogyny, explicit or mature content, ableism, harassment, homophobia, transphobia, or bigotry.

This information helps us ensure that we can resolve issues quickly, while keeping our team safe and strong.


Acknowledgement and license

This code of conduct is released under an Attribution CC BY license.

In creating these community guidelines, we were inspired by the Vox Media code of conduct, the Vox Product code of conduct, SRCCON code of conduct, SB Nation’s community guidelines, and guidelines from the Ada Initiative and The Coral Project.