If you're building a premium course with us, you'll need to adhere to certain guidelines that help us ensure a consistent and high-quality experience for our learners. This article isn't about the specific guidelines that we apply (you can read more about those here), but rather how and when they are applied.

As you're developing your course, you are likely working on a non-master branch of your course, merging changes into the master branch as they are reviewed by your DataCamp course developer. When a development branch is merged into the master branch, a diagnostics check will be run to check whether you have violated any of the guidelines. If so, you'll see messages like this in the "Builds" tab of your course dashboard (while in the Master branch):

Although these are content guidelines, they do not necessarily break the course. For this reason, the guidelines appear as warnings, but won't cause your builds to fail (In the example above, the build finished, despite the guideline violations).

We realize that it can be difficult (and perhaps a bit frustrating) to adhere to a number of guidelines, but we assure you they've been developed with care, over a long period of time, and based upon evidence we have about how our learners learn best.

That said, we want you to focus as much as possible on creating high-quality data science content and not about meeting these deadlines, so over time we'll be moving these warnings out of the build logs and into the editor.

This way you'll be notified right away when you're not meeting one or more guidelines (e.g. if you exceed the maximum word count in an instructions field, or have too many exercises in a chapter) without having to toggle back and forth between the editor and the build logs.

If you ever have questions, don't hesitate to ask. We're here for you!