Code of Conduct

KyPost handles other people’s mail, mail credentials, and private keys. Getting that right takes people who disagree with each other in public and keep showing up anyway. This document exists so that disagreement stays about the work.

Our Commitment

Everyone who contributes to KyPost — code, documentation, bug reports, security findings, translations, or a question in an issue — is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, caste, colour, or sexual identity and orientation.

We are building software for people who want control over their own mail. A project about self-determination that treats its contributors as interchangeable would be lying about what it is.

What We Expect

• Assume the other person is trying. Read the strongest version of what they wrote before you answer it.
• Be specific. “This is wrong” helps nobody. “This drops the lock before the write, so two pollers can interleave here” helps everybody.
• Ask, don’t assume, about people. Use the name and pronouns a person uses for themselves. If you don’t know someone’s pronouns, use they/them. A correction is not an attack; take it, apply it, move on.
• Let inexperience be visible. Someone asking a basic question in public is doing the project a favour — that question is the documentation gap made legible. Answer it or point at the doc; don’t perform surprise that it was asked.
• Accept review gracefully, including when you’re right. Explain your reasoning, link the evidence, and let the maintainers decide.
• Credit work. Say whose idea it was. This includes crediting a bug report that led to a fix, and disclosing AI assistance as CONTRIBUTING requires.

What We Won’t Accept

• Sexualised language or imagery, or unwanted sexual attention of any kind.
• Slurs, demeaning jokes, or “just asking questions” about whether a group of people belongs here.
• Personal attacks, insults, or derogatory comments — including the kind dressed up as technical rigour.
• Deliberate misgendering or persistent use of a name a person has asked you not to use.
• Publishing someone’s private information (physical or email address, private messages, employer, legal name) without their explicit permission.
• Harassment in public or in private, including following someone across threads, repos, or platforms to continue an argument they have left.
• Retaliation against anyone who reports a Code of Conduct problem or a security vulnerability.

Hostile Reviews Are About Code, Never People

KyPost deliberately runs adversarial review: human reviewers, and AI reviewers running skills that are instructed to be unimpressed with your work. Every PR gets torn at on purpose, because the alternative is finding out from a user whose mailbox credentials leaked. See CONTRIBUTING.

That practice has an exact boundary, and the boundary is this:

• In scope: “This design cannot work.” “You have not shown this is safe.” “This adds a silent fallback and the project doesn’t allow those.” “This looks like a rewrite, not a patch.” Blunt, unsoftened, repeated if it wasn’t heard the first time.
• Out of scope: anything about the author. Their competence, their motives, their care, their seniority, whether they “should know better,” whether they used AI, or how many times they’ve been wrong before.

Hostility toward a design is a service. Hostility toward a person is a Code of Conduct violation, and calling it “just being direct,” “the hostile review persona,” or “what the skill told me to say” does not change that. An AI reviewer that crosses this line is the fault of the human who ran it and pasted the output.

If you are the author on the receiving end: a severity-ranked list of things that are wrong with your patch is not a verdict on you. Read it, take what’s real, push back on what isn’t. Nobody here got a clean first review.

Scope

This applies in every project space — issues, pull requests, discussions, commit messages, code comments, the wiki, and any chat or event where you are representing KyPost. It also applies to behaviour outside these spaces when that behaviour is directed at a member of this community because of their participation here.

Reporting

Report a problem privately to the maintainer, @Yoshiofthewire, through GitHub. Do not open a public issue about a Code of Conduct concern; that exposes the reporter first.

Include what happened, where, when, and links if you have them. You do not need to prove your case or have a remedy in mind to report something.

Reports are handled privately. The reporter’s identity is not disclosed to the person reported without the reporter’s consent. You may report on behalf of someone else, and you may report an incident you witnessed but were not the target of.

Security vulnerabilities are not a Code of Conduct matter. Report those through GitHub Security Advisories, as described in SECURITY.md.

Enforcement

The maintainer will review every report and respond. Depending on severity and history, the response may be:

1. A private word. A note explaining what was wrong and what to do instead.
2. A warning. Formal, with defined consequences for continuing — usually a period of no interaction with the people involved.
3. A temporary ban. No participation in project spaces for a stated period.
4. A permanent ban. For sustained harassment, aggression toward a group of people, or a pattern that has already been warned about.

Maintainers who do not enforce this document in good faith are subject to it themselves.

Attribution

Adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 2.1, with sections specific to this project’s adversarial review practice.