Issue Guidelines

Please read this document before submitting an issue or pull request to one of my projects. It really helps me out and let's me know that you respect my time. In return, I'll show the same respect in addressing your issue.

If you think this guide can be improved, please let me know.

Types of issues

On my projects, the GitHub issue tracker should only be used for one of the following:

Bugs — when a feature of the project has been identified as broken.
Feature requests — when you ask for a new feature to be added to a project.
Contribution enquiries — when you want to discuss whether a new feature or change would be accepted in a project before you begin development work on it.

These are some things that don't below in the issue tracker:

Please avoid personal support requests. I'm just one person and I cannot provide personal support for implementation issues. The best place for help is generally going to be StackOverflow, Twitter, IRC, etc.
Please avoid derailing issues. Keep the discussion on topic and respect the opinions of others.

Bugs

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository.

If you've come across a problem with the code and you're letting me know about it, thank you. I appreciate your time and the effort you're making to help improve the code for everyone else!

Please read the following guidelines for reporting bugs:

Use the GitHub issue search — check if the issue has already been reported. If it has been, please comment on the existing issue.
Check if the issue has been fixed — the latest master or development branch may already contain a fix.
Isolate the demonstrable problem — make sure that the code in the project's repository is definitely responsible for the issue. Create a reduced test case - an extremely simple and immediately viewable example of the issue.
Include a live example — provide a link to your reduced test case when appropriate (e.g. if the issue is related to frond-end technologies). Please use jsFiddle to host examples.

Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report too. What is your environment? What steps will reproduce the issue? What browser(s) and OS experience the problem? What would you expect to be the outcome. All these details will help me and others to assess and fix any potential bugs.

Example of a good bug report:

Short and descriptive title

A summary of the issue and the browser/OS environment in which it occurs. If suitable, include the steps required to reproduce the bug.

This is the first step

This is the second step

Further steps, etc.

<url> - a link to the reduced test case

Any other information you want to share that is relevant to the issue being reported. This might include the lines of code that you have identified as causing the bug, and potential solutions (and your opinions on their merits).

A good bug report shouldn't leave me needing to chase you up to get further information that is required to assess or fix the bug.

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome! Please provide links to examples or articles that help to illustrate the specifics of a feature you're requesting. The more detail, the better. It will help me to decide whether the feature is something I agree should become part of the project.

Contribution enquiries

Contribution enquiries should take place before any significant pull request, otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that I might not want to pull into the repository.

In this regard, some contribution enquires may be feature requests that you would like to have a go at implementing yourself if they are wanted. Other enquiries might revolve around refactoring code or porting a project to different languages.

Pull requests

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help.

If you've spotted any small, obvious errors and want to help out by patching it, that will be much appreciated.

If your contribution involves a significant amount of work or substantial changes to any part of the project, please open a "contribution enquiry" issue first to check that the work is wanted or matches the goals of the project.

All pull requests should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

Please follow this process; it's the best way to get your work merged into the project:

Fork the project.
Clone your fork ( git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/<repo-name>git).
Add an upstream remote (git remote add upstream git://github.com/<upsteam-owner>/<repo-name>.git).
Get the latest changes from upstream (e.g. git pull upstream <dev-branch>).
Create a new topic branch to contain your feature, change, or fix ( git checkout -b topic-name ).
Make sure that your changes adhere to the current coding conventions used throughout the project - indentation, accurate comments, etc.
Commit your changes in logical chunks. Please adhere to these git commit message guidelines or your pull request is unlikely be merged into the main project.
Push the branch up to your fork ( git push origin topic-name ).
Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description. Please mention which browsers you tested in.

If you have any other questions about contributing, please feel free to contact me.