User forum posting guidelines

Security Vulnerabilities

Keep exploit details out of public forums, mailing lists, and issue tracker.

If you encounter a security vulnerability in GeoServer please take care to report in a responsible fashion:

1. Keep exploit details out of public forums, mailing lists, and issue tracker.
2. There are two options to report a security vulnerability:
   • Please send an email directly to the volunteers on the private geoserver-security@lists.osgeo.org mailing list. Provide information about the security vulnerability you might have found in your email.
     This is a moderated list: send directly to the address; your email will be moderated; and eventually shared with volunteers.
   • To report via GitHub:
     Navigate to security page, use link for Private vulnerability reporting.
     For more information see GitHub documentation.
3. There is no expected response time. Be prepared to work with geoserver-security email list volunteers on a solution.
4. Keep in mind participants are volunteering their time, an extensive fix may require fundraising/resources.

Refer to the GeoServer Security policy.

Code of Conduct

Be kind to yourself and others.

GeoServer communication channels follow the contributor code of conduct. This is the code of conduct policy recommended by OSGeo.

We also ask that you be respectful to yourself, all technology can be difficult, and GeoServer is a community effort. If you are having difficulty do not blame yourself (which is disrespectful) and identify an area where you can ask for assistance and improve the technology, documentation, or provide a bug report.

Take a little, give a little

The user group is there to help you, but it works best if you help it too. Give back to the GeoServer project and community by answering questions, or pointing people towards other useful sources of information when you can. We will like you a lot!
If we notice you ask questions without ever helping other people, we'll be less inclined to help you in return instead (but don't panic, if you don't care about participating, commercial support providers can handle your needs).

Start discussions on the Discourse forum, keep it on the Discourse forum

You might be tempted to contact some of the people trying to help on the Discourse user group privately. Please refrain from doing so, on the user group more people can look at your message and provide answers, share different points of views, and besides that, messages on the public user group are archived for future reference.
If someone answers your requests privately, please nudge your replies back publicly, for the benefit of the entire community.
However, it's fine to send private messages if you are trying to share sensitive information which is necessary to solve the issue, or if you are trying to engage a developer in a commercial development /support contract.

Be polite

Messages to the user group are not moderated so whatever is in your post when you hit the send button will be seen by all. Attempts to get undue attention, such as marking the message as "urgent" or title it "help me!!!", use a subject in full capitals, or sending multiple times the message because you did not get an answer right away, will likely result in your message just being ignored.

GeoServer activities follow the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct as part of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation commitment to diversity.

Check first, the answer might already be out there

Before posting a question, check to see if it is already answered in the following:

• GeoServer User Manual
• GeoServer User Forum
• gis.stackexchange.com #geoserver
• stackoverflow.com #geoserver
• Use a web search engine with the error message you're getting, or with keywords summarizing the problem you're experiencing.
  Sometimes the solution is already available in a blog post, and at other times the search engine will get you straight to the documentation page talking about the problem.
• Ask Chat GTP or other LLM.
  Since our documentation and source code is public these models are often well informed.

Post enough (but not too much)

If you are experiencing a problem when configuring data, making REST calls or using the OGC services it normally helps to have a certain amount of information from the start.
You can try to make a quick question before gathering all this data. We understand the list is long, but knowing from the start that you're on Linux using shapefiles vs Windows using SQL server, or using GeoServer 2.20.2 vs a nightly build makes a world of difference in the answer you can get.
The list of information you should provide is:

• Your GeoServer version, Java version, and operating system (e.g. GeoServer 2.26.1 running on Java 17, running on Windows Server 2022)
• The full stack trace of the errors you get, if applicable (look for it in the GeoServer logs, or enable "verbose exception reporting" in the "server" panel to include stack trace in OGC service exception reports)
• If you're publishing data fetched from other software, the name and version of the other software GeoServer is interacting with (e.g. PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Oracle and so on)

Avoid posting "too much" is also important. Please realize the user group works off volunteers answering in their spare time or on a break from work. This means they will have little time to read your post, figure out an answer, and write it down. Try to keep the post short and on point, if you have multiple questions it's best to split them among separate posts, focusing on one problem (and thus one answer) at a time. In short, try to make it easy and quick to help you.

Mind that attachment

We love to get screenshots and sample data from you, but the maximum size of a message posted to the group is 200KB. If you need to share larger files, you should upload them to some server and then link to them. Some popular free choices for doing that are Google Drive (share with anybody that has the link) or Dropbox (put the file in your public folder and share the link to it).

Be patient

Remember questions are answered by volunteers, often in their own spare time.
Depending on the work and life schedules of the GeoServer developers and other useful group members, it might not be possible to respond to your question immediately or even at all. It could also be that no one on the group knows the answer.
If your project requires immediate, guaranteed assistance you should investigate the commercial support options available for GeoServer.

Share your solutions

If you have posted to the group seeking an answer to a GeoServer problem, and then discover the solution yourself, please take the time to share it with the group: your answer will then remain in the archives for the benefit of other users.
Also, if an answer solved your problem, please let us know that. It will help the morale of whoever helped you.

If it turns out it's a bug

First off, check the bug tracker and if there is no existing report of that problem, create one and provide information on how to reproduce on a developer machine:

• a data sample (no need to provide it if you can reproduce the issue with the demo data coming with the GeoServer installation)
• the style, if applicable
• the OGC/REST request that fails for service and configuration requests, or the steps on the UI to reproduce the problem in case of administration GUI problem
• Anything else that might be needed to fully reproduce your problem. Remember that in most cases being able to reproduce your problem locally is the only way to provide you with help.