# Contribute

## Introduction

First, thank you for considering contributing to colly! It's people like you that make the open source community such a great community! 😊

We welcome any type of contribution, not only code. You can help with 
- **QA**: file bug reports, the more details you can give the better (e.g. screenshots with the console open)
- **Marketing**: writing blog posts, howto's, printing stickers, ...
- **Community**: presenting the project at meetups, organizing a dedicated meetup for the local community, ...
- **Code**: take a look at the [open issues](https://github.com/gocolly/colly/issues). Even if you can't write code, commenting on them, showing that you care about a given issue matters. It helps us triage them.
- **Money**: we welcome financial contributions in full transparency on our [open collective](https://opencollective.com/colly).

## Your First Contribution

Working on your first Pull Request? You can learn how from this *free* series, [How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub](https://app.egghead.io/playlists/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github).

## Submitting code

Any code change should be submitted as a pull request. The description should explain what the code does and give steps to execute it. The pull request should also contain tests.

## Code review process

The bigger the pull request, the longer it will take to review and merge. Try to break down large pull requests in smaller chunks that are easier to review and merge.
It is also always helpful to have some context for your pull request. What was the purpose? Why does it matter to you?

## Financial contributions

We also welcome financial contributions in full transparency on our [open collective](https://opencollective.com/colly).
Anyone can file an expense. If the expense makes sense for the development of the community, it will be "merged" in the ledger of our open collective by the core contributors and the person who filed the expense will be reimbursed.

## Questions

If you have any questions, create an [issue](https://github.com/gocolly/colly/issues/new) (protip: do a quick search first to see if someone else didn't ask the same question before!).

## Credits

### Contributors

Thank you to all the people who have already contributed to colly!
<a href="graphs/contributors"><img src="https://opencollective.com/colly/contributors.svg?width=890" /></a>

## AI Policy

### Restrictions on Generative AI Usage

- **All AI usage in any form must be disclosed.** You must state the tool you used (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Amp) along with the extent that the work was AI-assisted.
- **The human-in-the-loop must fully understand all code.** If you use generative AI tools as an aid in developing code or documentation changes, ensure that you fully understand the proposed changes and can explain why they are the correct approach.
- **AI should never be the main author of the PR.** AI may be used as a tool to help with developing, but the human contribution to the code changes should always be reasonably larger than the part written by AI. For example, you should be the one that decides about the structure of the PR, not the LLM.
- **Issues and PR descriptions must be fully human-written.** Do not post output from Large Language Models or similar generative AI as comments on any of our discussion forums, as such comments tend to be formulaic and low content. If you're not a native English speaker, using AI for translating self-written issue texts to English is okay, but please keep the wording as close as possible to the original wording.
- **Bad AI drivers will be denounced.** People who produce bad contributions that are clearly AI (slop) will be blocked for all future contributions.
- **AI should never be used for "good first issues"** The purpose of "good first issues" is to provide a smooth on boarding experience for anyone who would like to be involved in contributing to a project and not to be a low hanging fruit for AI models.

### There are Humans Here

Every discussion, issue, and pull request is read and reviewed by humans. It is a boundary point at which people interact with each other and the work done. It is rude and disrespectful to approach this boundary with low-effort, unqualified work, since it puts the burden of validation on the maintainer.

It takes a lot of maintainer time and energy to review AI-generated contributions! Sending the output of an LLM to open source project maintainers extracts work from them in the form of design and code review, so we call this kind of contribution an "extractive contribution".

The _golden rule_ is that a contribution should be worth more to the project than the time it takes to review it, which is usually not the case if large parts of your PR were written by LLMs.