What's the proper way to make changes to the website?

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Hello.

How do I make changes to the website? The contributing tab wasn’t too clear, and neither was the contributing section in the About page nor the Volunteering guidelines. On this forum there is a Site Development category, but it doesn’t say too much on how this all works either.

I am not too familiar with how GitHub projects work. From what I understand, a Pull Request is “opened” when an individual writes up actual changes to the content of the site. These are usually written to fix Issues, and they are “merged” whenever the team decides they want it on the site.

  • Is everything at the behest of the team? Or can non-team members also merge?
  • Do I create an Issue on GitHub, or do I make a post on the forum?
  • Can I write up a Pull Request in direct response to an Issue? Or do I have to do that here somehow? If so, how?
  • For adding onto the Knowledge Base, do I write up a Wiki post and hope that it gets added? Or can I open a Pull Request?
  • If I create an Issue or “suggestion” (on the forum, not GitHub), what is the process for having that suggestion accepted or declined? There are so many suggestions that are being neither accepted nor declined, just in limbo. And any new ones will feel like tears in the rain.
  • What if I just want to write up grammar changes or something? Do I also have to create a suggestion for that and wait for it to be accepted/declined?

Note that these questions do not necessarily need to be answered in particular. As long as it is clarified how exactly I can contribute, I think I can go from there.

Please lay out the propper channels for individuals to make changes to the website, or please direct me, if available, the to a link or page or post describing the propper channels.

Much appreciated, thank you.

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Good questions!

The GitHub issues are only for quick fixes that need no discussion, for example dns0.eu has been discontinued · Issue #3152 · privacyguides/privacyguides.org · GitHub is obvious because everyone can clearly see dns0.eu was indeed discontinued, and we made a quick PR to merge it within 6 hours.

Otherwise, we want everything to first be discussed in:

We wait for those to be marked as approved before a team member makes a Pull Request for them.

Usually other people do not write Pull Requests, although you are certainly welcome to, and it does happen from non-team members occasionally. I typically wouldn’t recommend it though, because we have a specific writing style, and especially if you’re making a Pull Request about something that hasn’t been pre-approved then it can take a long time.

We do get a good number of Pull Requests about things which have never been discussed in the community before, and they typically end up closed or they can take months or longer to merge, and then those contributors feel discouraged about the whole process, which is really unfortunate. So that is why I usually would prefer people make suggestions here on the forum first, and then a team member will write a Pull Request when the time is right.

Yes. The quickest PRs to merge are ones that close GitHub Issues or ones that complete an approved suggestion.

Usually here on the forum. If you click the new issue button on GitHub it will tell you exactly when and when not to post to GitHub though.

You can absolutely do that without prior discussion if the meaning of the text does not change.

Something I will note though: Every time we change a sentence, it means that sentence has to be re-translated by our volunteer translators. For that reason I typically don’t like Pull Requests that make minor grammar changes unless they are particularly egregious problems.

Typically we prioritize approving them based on the number of votes they have, but they can be approved and completed in any order, and we do read all of them.

Depends on the topic.

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