Our Ethos
How we work with the people who use and build Noctalia.
Noctalia is free and open source, built and maintained by a small team in our spare time. What you get from us - the software, the fixes, the features - is a gift, not a service we owe you. We enjoy building this and we want to keep enjoying it, so here is how we think about that relationship.
What you can expect from us
- Working software, freely licensed: no strings attached, no paywall, no bait and switch.
- Feature requests we genuinely consider: we read them, we discuss them, and we've already shipped plenty of user-requested features when they fit the project.
- Bug fixes, as our time allows: real bugs get fixed. Not always immediately, but they don't get ignored either.
- Honesty about our limits: if something isn't going to happen, we'll say so instead of leaving you hanging.
What we don't promise
A gift exchange is not a support contract. That means:
- No one is owed a specific review timeline, merge date, or release for their PR or feature request.
- No guaranteed response time on Discord, GitHub issues, or anywhere else.
- No commitment that a given feature, plugin, or PR will land at all, even if it's well-made - it also has to fit where the project is going.
On following up
We're a small team maintaining this alongside our own jobs and lives. If you've opened a PR or issue, one polite nudge after a reasonable wait is completely fine - things do fall through the cracks and a reminder helps.
Pinging us daily on Discord with "please review my PR" does not speed things up. It doesn't jump the queue - if anything, it takes time away from actually reviewing code, which slows everyone down. Ask once, then trust us to get to it. We will.
How to actually help your PR get attention
- Keep it small and focused. One change, one purpose - it's easier to review and easier to merge.
- Explain the "why", not just the "what". A clear description saves us the time of reverse-engineering your intent.
- Follow the existing code style and conventions already in the repository.
- For bugs, include clear reproduction steps. "It's broken" is much harder to act on than "here's exactly how to trigger it".
- Be patient. Patience is, in practice, the single biggest thing that helps.
A few ground rules
- Be respectful. Disagreement about a design decision is fine; hostility, entitlement, or pressure tactics are not.
- No harassment of maintainers or other contributors, on Discord, GitHub, or anywhere else connected to this project.
- Repeated demands after a maintainer has already answered aren't persistence, they're pressure - and they don't work on us.
- We'll mute, remove, or ban anyone who makes the community a worse place to be in.
Give back if you can
If Noctalia is useful to you, we'd love your help - code, documentation, testing, translations, or well-written bug reports all genuinely move the project forward. But you don't have to contribute anything at all. The software stays free either way. That's the exchange: we give what we can, you take what you need, and anything you give back is a gift too - not a debt being repaid.
Contact
Questions about any of this? Reach us on Discord or open an issue on our GitHub repository.