Contributor onboarding
What we check, before you submit
Most rejected submissions are not bad work — they are work that never found out what the standard was. Here is the whole bar, in the order the gates apply it, with the same numbers the outcomes page reports.
Gate 1
Automated audit — runs before a human sees anything
Accessibility
Components are audited on semantics, focus order, contrast and keyboard reachability. The catalog's own standard is an audit score of 98+ for anything we would call accessible-ready; 77 of 289 published assets hold that band.
Bundle budget
Under 5 KB for an element, under 12 KB for a section, dependencies excluded but declared. Over budget is not an automatic rejection — an unexplained over-budget is.
Style lint
Naming, token use, no hard-coded palette values, no commented-out experiments. Warnings are fixable; failures mean the fix is not obvious from the submission.
Sandbox safety
Components run in isolation with network and storage access observed. A flagged write to storage or an outbound request blocks the entry by default.
Fidelity
Prompts are run and scored. You must submit the model list and the raw scores, including the runs that failed.
Gate 2
Human review — the part a gate cannot do
Is it original?
Written by you, or a documented remix. Copied third-party code without a licence is an instant rejection, however good it looks.
Does the change note match?
We open the diff. “Smaller bundle” has to be smaller than the thing it forked.
Would a reader learn something?
A submission that only re-orders existing code needs a reason to exist. A rename is not a remix.
Is the credit right?
Original author, your handle, and the licence of what you forked — see the attribution policy.
Why entries come back
The sample queue that ships with this build holds 10 entries: 4 with every gate clean, 5 carrying a warning, and 1 blocked by a safety failure. Reading the warn column is the fastest way to learn the bar — those are the submissions that were nearly right.
The five commonest fixes
Add the missing focus style. Replace hard-coded hex with a token. Declare the dependency you used. Write the change note as a sentence, not a title. Keep the original's credit line.
What never gets through
Failing sandbox checks, unattributed copied code, and submissions that disable reduced-motion handling to look better in a demo.
What gets fast-tracked
Sibling variants of popular patterns, a11y-strict versions, and fixes to a documented bug with the reproduction attached.
Pre-flight checklist
- Run an accessibility pass yourself and write the score and the tool into the submission note.
- State the shipped size and the dependency list, or state that there are none.
- Test the reduced-motion path and say what changes when it is on.
- Say which published asset you started from, with its slug.
- Write one paragraph explaining the change — what you tried first, and why this version won.
- Name the original author in the credit line, even when you rewrote every line.