Welcome to the SonarSource Community!

Who is the SonarSource Community for?

The SonarSource Community is a collaborative forum where SonarSourcers and users of Sonar products post every day. You’ll find detailed technical discussions and articles that cover the most common use cases, as well as some tricky ones. It’s a great resource for working through problems, and gaining knowledge about our products and more generally about clean code.

This is a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge, and advice. Treat it like one!

How should I contribute to the Community?

Make sure additions to existing threads are appropriate

Do you have a suggestion or tip to help the original poster on an existing thread?

Then please do add it to that thread.

Do you think you have the same question or problem as an existing thread?

If the thread is still relatively new and unsolved, your additional details may help point to the root cause. Please add them!
If the thread is older than 2 months, you should create a new thread that includes all your own details. A lot can change in 2 months, and simply “me too”-ing on an old thread doesn’t help anyone help you. But do reference any existing threads that seem relevant.

Make sure you’re starting a topic in the right category

This forum is organized in different categories, covering the most common requests you may have. Make sure to choose carefully, to maximise your chances to get the attention of interested people.
The pinned topic in each category is here to help you to better understand what we expect to see in each of them, and often detail the appropriate format for your post.

Keep to one subject per topic

Most of the time, your question will deserve a new topic, containing information specific to your situation. If many topics should be consolidated into one, we’ll take care of it! In addition…

Do not bump old posts and try to tag-on with a possibly related issue.
Do not divert a topic by changing it midstream

Provide as much detail as possible, and keep your topic tidy

Provide as much detail as possible. What are you trying to do, what have you tried, and what hasn’t worked? Dumping logs and calling it a day won’t get you much attention.

A meaningful title
Helpful tags (if you’re having trouble analyzing Java code, add the java tag). However, more is not necessarily better
A well formatted post is more likely to get attention.
Make sure to provide as much context as possible for users to understand your ask
For any technical issue provide logs, version numbers, steps to reproduce
Always share what investigations were performed already and/or which content you’ve already consulted

Do your homework

We expect you to have taken a look at product documentation, and have searched around for an answer before posting. For instance, common issues are often described in our Community Guides.

Sharing code or logs

When possible, we prefer that users share code/logs publicly, redacted as necessary, so that all users can benefit from these interactions in the Community. Our default is transparency.

However, sometimes it’s just not reasonable to post all the necessary material publicly, or even to redact it. In such cases, SonarSourcers may agree to accept your code or logs privately for further troubleshooting. You can identify SonarSourcers by the Sonar “waves” placed over their avatars.

Users of SonarQube Server (Developer Edition, Enterprise Edition, Data Center Edition) can refer to the SonarSource Terms and Conditions for specific provisions related to confidentiality. SonarQube Cloud users can similarly refer to the SonarQube Cloud Terms of Service.

Your organization may have its own standards for redacting/sharing information, and we strongly encourage you to follow them. We are not responsible if you elect to share code or logs with anyone other than SonarSourcers.

Confidential information

If you believe information is confidential, you shouldn’t post it. Users have permissions to edit their own posts for a time after initially submitting them, so if you realize later that you’ve accidentally posted something confidential, you should try editing the post to remove it. If you are unable to edit the post, you can contact us to edit the post. Do not post or share information such as:

Access credentials, such as user names combined with passwords, or other sensitive secrets that can grant access to your organization’s server, network, or domain. Note that analysis tokens are not automatically considered to be sensitive secrets since they can simply be disabled on your side.
AWS tokens and other similar access credentials that grant access to a third party on your behalf. You must be able to show that the token does belong to you.
Documentation (such as network diagrams or architecture) that poses a specific security risk for an organization.
Information related to and posing a security risk to you as an individual (such as social security numbers or other government identification numbers).

If you are not the author of a post you believe exposes confidential information belonging to you or to your organization, please contact us with evidence establishing your connection to the confidential information.

We generally do not consider the following types of information to be confidential:

Internal server names, IP addresses, and URLs, unless you can demonstrate that their use in a particular file or piece of code poses a security threat.
Mentions of your company’s name, brand, domain name, or other similar references to your company.

To request a post edit, please send a private message to @CommunityManagers. If you are unable to send private messages within the community, email community@sonarsource.com. Edit requests must include a link to the post in question, clear identification of what in the post is confidential, what the risk is, and evidence establishing your connection to the confidential information.

Be Civil

The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.

Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
Be respectful. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
More than that, be kind. Everyone has something they don’t know much about. Everyone needs help sometimes. And everyone makes mistakes. Give the kinds of responses you would like to get.
Constructive criticism is welcome, but criticize ideas and product features, not people.
Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
Respect our forum. Don’t use hate speech or images. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the biggest newspaper in your country (e.g. the New York Times).

This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

I created a topic, when can I expect a response?

This is an open community with people volunteering their free time to provide assistance. We’re eager to contribute to the community, but you are not guaranteed a fast response.

Be patient

Wait a few days before bumping a topic that hasn’t received a response.
Do not @name mention individuals not involved in the topic.

Contribute as much as you expect to receive

Contribute to the community (helping others) as much as you expect to receive help.

It is not a replacement for more structured support

If you need SLAs, guaranteed response, privacy, SonarSource also offers Commercial Support.

What is @name mentioning? Should I do it?

@name mentioning is when you type someone’s username with an @ preceding it. Doing this sends a notification to the user. Depending on their settings, it may also send them an email message.

In general, it is considered bad form to @name mention someone not already engaged in the conversation. Please don’t do it.

Why not?

It can be annoying

Active people who were being frequently mentioned in topics were first to request that this practice be minimized. Some people may not mind being mentioned, but we’d still like to limit the number of notifications these folks get.
@name mentioning a user will often send them an email. Abuse of this feature can fill up someone’s email inbox.
Some community members feel that too much unsolicited pinging discourages them from participating in the long-run. It can be overwhelming to be on the hook to reply to any and all follow-up.

It is often unnecessary

Active users often get notifications of new posts and watch the site regularly anyway.
Posting to the best category with a descriptive title will usually get your topic more attention than mentioning specific users.
In general, this community prefers to keep discussions focused on ideas and not individual users . If you do not feel your post has received the attention you’d like, we encourage you to reformulate it rather than call in specific people.

Can I ever @name mention other users?

Yes! We just ask you to use it thoughtfully and sparingly. Some good uses of @name mentioning:

To clarify who you are responding to, in a conversation that has multiple participants
To give credit to someone from whom you learned the information you are passing on

What if I see something that shouldn’t be here?

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

I want out

New users (no more than 1 post, made 60 days ago or less) can delete their own accounts from their user preference page. Other users should email community@sonarsource.com to have their accounts anonymized. Please include your site username in the request. Ideally, your contact will come from an email address associated with your account.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.