Any forum that HAS downvotes or would ban you for asking questions isn't worth using. Might I ask which sites have given you that type of response? Lemme guess, suck-up sycophant hives of scum and villiany like SitePoint where any dissension is met with hostility and bans?
I mean, you might get some harsh answers, answers you might not want to hear, but downvotes and bans?
There's a saying I use a lot:
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people. Smart people ask questions when they don't know something.
Basically, ignorant is not an insult. It means you don't know... so ask, we can fix ignorant. Whilst Ron White was right, you can't fix stupid.
As to having no senior dev or project leader, THAT is problematic even under the best of circumstances. It pretty much means you've got a bunch of greenhorns plodding around directionless. Who's supervising who works on what? Who's handing out tasks? Deciding how to divide up the workload? Reviewing commits for security reasons or changes that don't match the end goal.
Admittedly, I'm from the age when a project manager handled all merges and submissions, rode the herd on the entire project, and actually did their job instead of sitting in their office playing Farmville all day blindly hoping that version control software would do their job for them.
NOT that I'm saying there's anything wrong with version control software in and of itself, but like a great many tools projects are becoming over-reliant on them instead of putting more responsibility in the hands and laying accountability at the feet of the PEOPLE involved in a project.
Edouard Duplessis
Fullstack PHP JS