In the past few weeks, the Rails team has been working on a few changes to lower the barrier for new contributors to the framework.

We started by disabling the automatic closing of stale PRs. While initially this automation helped the project keep the issues tracker under control, nowadays things are better and we prefer to go back to full human interaction.

To make it easier for contributors to recognize all the members of the Rails team, we made public the list of current members of the Issues team. The Issues team assists with issues triage, pull request reviews and documentation improvements, so they are often the first interaction users have with the Rails team.

Today, we are opening a Discord server to allow contributors to help each other and lower the overhead of communicating with new contributors.

This new server is open to the public using this invite link, and is a great place to get help on how to contribute to the framework and its related libraries. This server will not be a support channel for the framework. For support, we will continue to use the Ruby on Rails talk category in the Discourse forum. Complementing those channels, we will have the GitHub issue tracker for issue and pull requests and our Ruby on Rails Core category for larger discussions about features and possible contributions.

The Discord server will follow the same Code Of Conduct as the rest of the Rails official spaces.

We hope to see you there!