Carbon Language community transparency report through 2025-12-31

[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

We’ve had a little more moderation work to do in the last months of 2025. Interestingly of varied nature.
We are still experiencing a very slow decrease in crowd size on Discord (with 4,803 members to date): the group of active members is consolidating itself, while our GitHub project keeps growing. 185 users had contributed to the project up to the day this report was published. Many of those who joined us on Discord when we went public in 2022 are now leaving the server after realizing they won’t get involved for now, while more folks are becoming active in the GitHub repository directly.

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 on 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 2025-10-01 through 2025-12-31

In Q4 2025, our Discord AutoMod bots caught and blocked 5 messages by 4 different users containing harmful language. 2 of them got the message and found more mindful wording for their message. One complained about us requesting the use of inclusive language in our communication and was banned.
Our AutoMod bots also blocked some messages that looked like spam but weren’t: we are currently blocking sharing links to other Discord channels. It happened 5 times, and none of the messages were spam. We may find a better way to filter out that sort of spam in the future. For now, members are asked to edit their messages accordingly and it does not seem to be an issue.

We also had spam that was handled manually, beyond the aforementioned AutoMod activity:
One of the spamming accounts was of the aforementioned user banned for refusing to use mindful language in the end. 3 other accounts were banned and their multiple spam messages were deleted.

2 Discord members were banned for deliberately using harmful language straight away, 2 other users were educated about this policy, and one of them received a warning accordingly.

4 Discord members’ job search messages were deleted, one of the users was banned after keeping posting such off-topic messages after being told such posts were not welcome in our spaces.

Also, we hid an off-topic comment on GitHub, deleted unhelpful comments placed on an old PR on GitHub, and we deleted personal events mistakenly saved in our Google Calendar.

Other activity

Otherwise, we had quite a few conversations in the team.

First, we discussed the latest interview round we had run with C# community leaders, leading to interesting insights about how other communities think about how they are doing and what they think is a healthy path forward as one.

We also looked into the current state of competence confidence across our moderation team, to identify potential skill gaps that we’d like to bridge.

Besides, we had a conversation about the pros and cons of deleting messages on Discord when they do not comply with our community rules (especially our CoC - Code of Conduct), since we are not able to edit other people’s messages on our server.

Also Discord-related: we talked about which message formats could be safely automatically caught and blocked by our AutoMod bots, in addition to our current filtering rules.

Then, we discussed whether or not it was worth sending a memo about making sure we do not use our Carbon team calendar as our personal Google calendar.

As for GitHub, we talked about when a contributor closes a discussion when it becomes unconstructive, without moderation team intervention.

Finally, we put together some ideas to try to remain open to contributions from people who don’t share our current core team members’ backgrounds.

Closing observations

As we look back at 2025, we can see that our community was indeed stabilizing in size and working pace, with good self-moderation across the board and only some need for moderation, in expected ways so far. So, we feel quite well-equipped for what’s coming up these days.

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, 2026-02-10