Carbon Language community transparency report through 2026-03-31

[CelineausBerlin]

The Carbon community works to be welcoming and kind among itself and to others, with a deep commitment to psychological safety. And we want to ensure that doesn’t change as we grow and evolve. To that end, we have a few ground rules that we ask all community members to adhere to:

• be welcoming,
• be friendly and patient,
• be considerate,
• be kind,
• be careful in the words that we choose,
• when we disagree, try to understand why, and
• recognize when progress has stopped, and take a step back.

The following summary is intended to help the community understand what kinds of Code of Conduct incidents were brought to our attention lately, and how we dealt with them.

Publishing such transparency reports on a regular basis is helping us track progress and hold ourselves accountable to high standards of community culture.

Summary

There was little need for us as moderators to intervene in the first quarter of 2026, and our AutoMod bots didn’t have much filtering to do either.

We continued to welcome new contributors on GitHub. We had merged Pull Requests from 190 individuals as of 2026-03-31, and 4,776 members on our Discord server up to that point.

To help with moderation and potential conduct issues, we could count on 11 trained people, including our community lead, whose role is guiding, training and coaching the team.
Our moderation and conduct team members are located in 3 different continents.

Our AutoMod bots are helping us on Discord, automatically catching the use of some harmful language and spam. The idea of having helping bots is to be able to focus on the educational and conversational part of our moderation role, and automate what does not need a human to be taken adequate care of. Indeed, some things are best taken care of by our carefully crafted AutoMod bots, and some by us, humans. So, we are keeping in check what the right balance between automated and manual moderation is, and are making adjustments along the way when appropriate.

Please note that some incidents may have escaped our attention. You can help us keep our spaces welcoming and fostering a spirit of collaboration, and report any situation that may require our intervention:
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Our interventions from 2026-01-01 through 2026-03-31

In Q1 2026, our Discord AutoMod bots filtered out 3 messages containing Discord links. One of them was a spam attempt indeed.

We witnessed a new trend of people joining our Discord server to seek employment unrelated to our work on the Carbon language. We decided these messages were off-topic, deleted them, and banned the users, who had shown no interest in our work nor our community rules before posting.
All in all, 5 users posting generic job-searches were banned.

Otherwise, we closed a dozen GitHub issues by a single user that were deemed off-topic, and redirected them to Discord and GitHub discussions.

Other activity

We had a conversation about whether bulk closing of multiple issues, mostly without further comment, was the best way to go about such a situation in the future.

Also, we decided to update our community rules on Discord to make it more explicit that generic job-seeking messages were off-topic, since we were expecting an influx of such messages in the times to come.

Besides, we discussed under which circumstances we wanted our individual names mentioned in certain contributions and when signing off as a team was more appropriate.

Finally, we decided to resume our internal learning activities, and worked on encouraging more open communication and constructive feedback in our community.

Closing observations

2026 started peacefully for us in the Carbon conduct and moderation team. We are slowly growing our active user base, while keeping up with a solid working pace and almost 100% self-moderation across our spaces. We are committed to keeping this all up this year toward our first release, if things go well!

We’ll keep watching and providing support when needed. We are always thrilled to welcome new contributing members, and we’ll make sure our spaces keep tidy and safe for all interested members to join the conversation.

Thank you all for your contributions, and see you soon!

The Carbon Code of Conduct team, 2026-04-13