It's unsurprising to read that anonymous reporting essentially failed. When you're in charge of a community and there is a dispute between two members, you have

It's unsurprising to read that anonymous reporting essentially failed. When you're in charge of a community and there is a dispute between two members, you have to act as a neutral third party. Anonymous reports force a bias on one side and prevent the person in charge from getting more details about the issue. I think especially in a technical community, GPG (or easier tools if any) are better suited to preserving privacy in important disputes. Side semi-related rant: Why are CoCs in FOSS communities often so bureaucratic and lengthy? I get the need for rules and enforcing of rules when you have a large community, but most of them outside of open source usually manage with very few rules, most of them which are always implied. Even HN's guidelines only contain three lines about attitude which all boil down to "be civil". I maintain two open source communities of 30 and 80 people, a gaming community of ~300 daily active members and a friends&family guild of ~200 members. I've never had to say anything else than "be nice" and "don't spam". Across all those, I've had to deal with two serious cases of harassment, neither of which would have been solved with a code of conduct. [NB: of course, community rules become a more pressing need the larger and less focused your community is] In the mean time, I see open source projects of 5-10 max adopting massive codes of conduct that make potential contributors feel like they're reading terms of service. I was part of the founding team of a small OSS group and one of the first things that came up was "we need a code of conduct" (as in, around the same time as "we need a roadmap", when the group had 5 members). In the well-meaning fight against harassment, I see people copypasting files like they're going to be a magic bullet. If you have a community where rude behaviour and/or harassment can be a concern, it's not a piece of paper that says not to that will help; you need moderators your members feel safe contacting and who know how to handle delicate situations.