(contributing:community)=

# Community communication channels

We use different channels of communication for different purposes. Whichever one you use will depend on what kind of communication you want to engage in.

## Discourse (recommended)

We use [Discourse](https://discourse.jupyter.org) for online discussions and support questions.
You can ask questions here if you are a first-time contributor to the JupyterHub project.
Everyone in the Jupyter community is welcome to bring ideas and questions there.

We recommend that you first use our Discourse as all past and current discussions on it are archived and searchable. Thus, all discussions remain useful and accessible to the whole community.

## Gitter

We use [our Gitter channel](https://gitter.im/jupyterhub/jupyterhub) for online, real-time text chat; a place for more ephemeral discussions. When you're not on Discourse, you can stop here to have other discussions on the fly.

## Github Issues

[Github issues](https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/about-issues) are used for most long-form project discussions, bug reports and feature requests.

- Issues related to a specific authenticator or spawner should be opened in the appropriate repository for the authenticator or spawner.
- If you are using a specific JupyterHub distribution (such as [Zero to JupyterHub on Kubernetes](https://github.com/jupyterhub/zero-to-jupyterhub-k8s) or [The Littlest JupyterHub](https://github.com/jupyterhub/the-littlest-jupyterhub/)), you should open issues directly in their repository.
- If you cannot find a repository to open your issue in, do not worry! Open the issue in the [main JupyterHub repository](https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/) and our community will help you figure it out.

```{note}
Our community is distributed across the world in various timezones, so please be patient if you do not get a response immediately!
```
