How to contribute

There are various ways to contribute to CryptPad, many of which do not require any coding skills. If you would like to discuss anything listed here, or other ways of contributing, please get in touch with the development team.

Spread the word

The simplest way to help CryptPad is to make the project known. As an Open Source project, CryptPad has very little budget to spare for marketing. We rely on the community to promote the service, for example by:

  • Using CryptPad and demonstrating it to friends and colleagues, highlighting why privacy is important.

  • Posting about CryptPad on social media.

  • Following and relaying our own communications from our blog or Mastodon account.

  • Relaying the CryptPad Crowdfunding.

  • Presenting CryptPad in conferences or meetups, or inviting the team to present.

  • Update any public catalog mentioning CryptPad, upvote the project and leave comments describing your experience using it.

For examples of past presentations please see the CryptPad Peertube Channel with playlists of presentation in English and French.

Here is a list of some public catalogs mentioning the project:

Report bugs

If you encounter a problem with CryptPad, reporting it helps improve the service for everyone. When reporting, please provide as much information as possible about the conditions in which the problem occurred, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead. These details help the team reproduce the error, which is the first step towards fixing it.

There are two ways to report bugs or issues:

  • Cryptpad's built in support ticket system where you can message instance administrators. These messages are encrypted like everything else on CryptPad.

  • Github issue tracker to file the issue publicly using the bug report template. (A Github account is needed to submit issues)

Contribute to the documentation

If you have corrections, edits, or suggestions for this documentation, you can contribute and help improve the service for everyone. Please send your proposed changes to the forum or use a GitHub pull request.

Translate CryptPad

The CryptPad team translates the software in English and French, with many more languages provided by the community. Translating CryptPad—and/or keeping translations up to date as the platform develops—is a much needed effort to make it available to as many people as possible.

To translate CryptPad itself please see the Translation guide.

To translate this documentation please visit the project on Weblate. To start translating a new language, please get in touch with the development team.

Current progression on translated languages:

Weblate-widget

Community translation program

CryptPad translations are a volunteer community effort. We are not able to offer financial compensation for translation work, but we offer free premium benefits on CryptPad.fr as a token of gratitude (increased storage and priority support).

Terms

Translator commitment

  • Make an account on our Weblate instance and use it for all translation work

  • Bring and/or maintain a language at or near 100% translated status

  • Keep the translation up to date as we release new versions of CryptPad approximately 4 times per year (the amount of work will depend on the functionality in each release)

CryptPad development team commitment

  • Enable a free Personal plan on CryptPad.fr for each translator as long as the translator commitments are met

  • Provide guidance and support in the CryptPad Translations matrix channel

  • Host and maintain the Weblate instance incl. all tools, glossary, etc

This program has so far been used only with individual translators, if you are translating as a group please contact the development team.

Contribute to the code

CryptPad is written in JavaScript and we accept pull requests on Github. Note that the security layer is separated from the application layer, so it is possible to contribute to CryptPad without skills in cryptography. Contributions include, by order of difficulty:

  • Fixing a bug from the issue tracker.

  • Adding a new feature.

  • Building a new application or integrating an existing one to CryptPad's encrypted real-time collaboration.

Please see the developer guide for more information and details of how to contribute code.

Financial support

Contribute to making CryptPad financially sustainable:

  • One-time or recurring donations on Open Collective.

  • Subscriptions to cryptpad.fr.

  • For larger organisations, contact the team if you would like to sponsor a feature or to discuss support contracts for an on-site instance.

Note

Note to instance owners: cryptpad.fr used to offer a revenue sharing system for subscriptions on self-hosted instances. We have discontinued this possibility at this time. However if you are an instance owner and are interested in such a system we would still be interested to hear from you. In the future we might be interested to restore such a revenue sharing model with large instance owners.