The Hitchhiker's Guide to Online Anonymity

Any opinion is welcome.

Feel free to discuss in the discussions section.

Feel free report issues in the issues section.

Code Free Contributions

There are multiple ways you can add to the guide:

• You can submit bugs and feature requests with detailed information about your issue or idea:
  • If you’d like to propose an addition, please follow the standards outlined here.
  • If you’re reporting an issue, please be sure to include the expected behaviour, the observed behaviour, and steps to reproduce the problem.
• This can require technical knowledge, but you can also get involved in conversations about bug reports and feature requests. This is a great way to get involved without getting too overwhelmed!
• Help fellow committers test recently submitted pull requests. Simply by pulling down a pull request and testing it, you can help ensure our new code contributions for stability and quality.

Content Contributions

For those of you who are looking to add content to the guide, include the following:

Pull Requests

• Do create a topic branch to work on instead of working directly on main. This helps to:
  • Protect the process.
  • Ensures users are aware of commits on the branch being considered for merge.
  • Allows for a location for more commits to be offered without mingling with other contributor changes.
  • Allows contributors to make progress while a PR is still being reviewed.
• Do follow the 50/72 rule for Git commit messages.
• Do write “WIP” on your PR and/or open a draft PR if submitting unfinished changes..
• Do make sure the title of a draft PR makes it immediately clear that it’s a draft
• Do target your pull request to the main branch.
• Do specify a descriptive title to make searching for your pull request easier.
• Don’t leave your pull request description blank.
• Don’t abandon your pull request. Being responsive helps us land your changes faster.
• Don’t post questions in older closed PRs.
• Do stick to the guide to find common style issues.
• Don’t make mass changes (such as replacing “I” with “we”) using automated serach/replace functionality.
  • Search/replace doesn’t understand context, and as such, will inevitably cause inconsistencies and make the guide harder to read.
  • If it’s part of a larger PR, it’ll also make the reviewer’s life harder, as they’ll have to go through manually and undo everything by hand.
  • If you’re going to make mass changes, take the time to do it properly. Otherwise I’ll just have to undo it anyway.
  • If your change contains backslashes (\), either escape them with another backslash (\\) or put them in a code block.

When reporting guide issues:

• Do write a detailed description of your issue and use a descriptive title.
• Do make it as detailed as possible and don’t just submit 50 line changes without explaining.
• Don’t file duplicate reports; search for your bug before filing a new report.
• Don’t attempt to report issues on a closed PR.

Large PRs

Please split large sets of changes into multiple PRs. For example, a PR that adds Windows 11 support, removes Windows AME references, and fixes typos can be split into 3 PRs. This makes PRs easier to review prior to merging.

For an example of what not to do, see: https://github.com/Anon-Planet/thgtoa/pull/51. This PR contains enough changes to split into multiple smaller and individually-reviewable PRs.

Updating PRs

While a PR is being reviewed, modifications may be made to it by the reviewer prior to merging. If this is the case, a new branch will be created for the PR’s review. If you would like to submit a change to a PR that is in the process of being reviewed, do not update the PR directly. This will only cause merge conflicts and delay the PR from being merged. Instead, submit your changes to the PR’s review branch.

For an example of what not to do, see: https://github.com/Anon-Planet/thgtoa/pull/51. Instead of submitting changes to the PR directly, they should have been submitted as changes to the PR’s associated review branch.

Thank you for taking the few moments to read this far! You’re already way ahead of the curve, so keep it up!