Maintainer

A maintainer is a trusted, usually long-standing contributor who has earned the responsibility of reviewing proposed changes and merging the good ones into the official Malairte codebase. Maintainers are gatekeepers in the helpful sense: they protect the project from broken or unsafe changes, guide newcomers through the contribution process, and hold the institutional knowledge of why things are built the way they are. The role is almost always unpaid and demanding, and burnout is common, so healthy projects spread the load across several maintainers rather than relying on one. Treating maintainers with patience and gratitude is basic community etiquette, because they spend unpaid hours reviewing other people's work.