The Indie Testing Community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of community members in any form.
This Code of Conduct (CoC) applies to all channels in the Indie Testing Community Slack, irrespective of whether those channels are public or private. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from the community at the discretion of the Mod Team.
In addition to our code of conduct, we also have a community principles document that we expect members to be mindful of when posting.
Some Indie Testing Community channels may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to all members of that channel. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.
Harassment includes:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
- Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
- Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names.
- Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate.
- Simulated physical contact (e.g. textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.
- Threats of violence.
- Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
- Deliberate intimidation.
- Stalking or following.
- Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
- Sustained disruption of discussion.
- Unwelcome sexual attention.
- Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
- Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
- Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
- Publication of non-harassing private communication.
Indie Testing Community prioritises marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The Mod Team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:
- ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
- Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
- Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
- Criticising racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
If you are being harassed by a member of the Indie Testing Community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the Mod Team (You can find a list of mods in the #admin channel info). If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.
This code of conduct applies to the Indie Testing Community Slack, but if you are being harassed by a member of the Indie Testing Community outside our space, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Indie Testing Community members, especially the Mod Team, seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The Mod Team reserves the right to exclude people from the Indie Testing Community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside the Indie Testing Community Slack and behavior towards people who are not in the Indie Testing Community.
In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.
We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of the Indie Testing Community members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Mod Team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from the Indie Testing Community Slack and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Indie Testing Community members or the general public.