Questions people actually ask

Yes, and the question is more common than you would think. Every issue in this project labelled good first issue was written for somebody who has never contributed before. Some of them are one line of HTML.

You cannot. You work on a copy (a fork), on a branch, and a maintainer reads your change before it goes anywhere near the real project. There is no button you can press that damages anything.

No. The Git basics page walks through every command you need, and there are only about six of them. You do not need to understand Git to make your first contribution — you need to follow six steps and then understand them afterwards.

Comment /claim on it. A bot assigns it to you within a few seconds and labels it status: claimed so nobody else picks it up.

Two. It is not a punishment — it is so that one person cannot claim fifteen issues and leave them sitting while everybody else has nothing to work on.

Comment /unclaim and it goes back in the pool. That is genuinely fine and nobody thinks less of you. If you go quiet for five days a bot releases it automatically.

Comment on your own issue saying what you have tried and where it stopped working. That is not an admission of failure — a well-described problem is itself a contribution, and it is how maintainers find out the instructions were unclear.

That line links your work to the issue and closes the issue automatically when you are merged. Without it somebody has to close it by hand, which is how issues get forgotten and two people end up doing the same work.

No. This is the normal path for most pull requests, including ones from people who have been writing code for twenty years. Push another commit to the same branch and the pull request updates itself.

An automatic check found something. Click Details to see which one and why — every check in this project prints the exact command to run on your own machine to reproduce it. A red check is information, not a verdict.

Within 48 hours. If it has been longer, say so in a comment on the pull request — you are not being annoying, we dropped the ball.

Yes. What you cannot do is open a pull request you are unable to explain. You are responsible for understanding the change, running it yourself, and answering questions about it in review — which is the whole point of doing this in the first place.