I was trying to create an issue when I saw a “guidelines for contributing” link to the Markdown CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository. It would look like the following screenshot:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdf0QmTMoiRzz7mCWdaxYsryOGXJ602Hq55zNi4QLPIamWuPzXo2LOzbWv_eDzULNe0rFfEhRnS6vHEAA-tZJjbJWS1DvLUZaixEE9O0Xqg98QUX8T2CxNpJY_FiPpkcDYmYxaEMbW0XQ/s640/GitHub%2520CONTRIBUTING%2520guidelines%2520link.png

GitHub has a Contributing Guidelines post about it. It works for Markdown and reStructuredText at least, since it’s only two I have seen. The latter, which I tried on my own repository after purposely renaming from CONTRIBUTE to CONTRIBUTING. Apparently you need to use V-ING to get it recognized.

Oh language, isn’t that fun? Which are you? “add” or “Add” or “Adds?” I am the first, lower case and base form. I found other than it, they are just too, well, how should I put it? Wordy or unnecessary formal when the commit message still not in the final result with those.

I didn’t try other Markup languages, but I guess as long as one works as being README it will also work as CONTRIBUTING. I like this feature, although I know there are still people don’t read and write a good a issue report when there clearly is a document page about how to contribute.

This is a feature from September 17, 2012, and I just discovered it, or rediscovered it, because I seem to remember I did see it before. However, it might just a handful of times, so I never paid any attentions to it before.

Anyhow, if you have a popular repository or you are a responsive owner, go create one for it if you haven’t.