Initially, bitcoin.org was used to host the original Bitcoin paper and became the homepage for the Bitcoin program. The site evolved into a general educational resource for Bitcoin, and is not affiliated with the modern Bitcoin Core project. The Bitcoin Core project’s official website is bitcoincore.org and while other websites continue to host information about Bitcoin Core, their views do not represent Bitcoin Core. We know that the Bitcoin ecosystem can be confusing, and we are working hard to make these relationships more clear.
For development work, Bitcoin Core mainly uses the #bitcoin-core-dev IRC channel on Freenode, Github, and the bitcoin-dev mailing list. We also recently created a community Slack group (request an invitation here) to enable the greater Bitcoin community to connect with Bitcoin Core developers and contributors more easily.
While there are many forums in which the Bitcoin community and, indeed, Bitcoin Core contributors engage, Bitcoin Core is not responsible for those forums or their policies, nor does Bitcoin Core take official positions on the community’s decisions to use them. Still, we believe it is critical that the Bitcoin community be able to freely discuss and critique every aspect of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin community can become extremely excited and heated when discussing Bitcoin, but we must all work to maintain a civil tone. Community members should not engage in brigading, denial-of-service attacks, or otherwise disrupt healthy discussion and we should all do our best to assume good faith in absence of reason to believe otherwise.