Getting help via IRC

For many people their first (and possibly only) interactions with people over IRC is to get support for software or hardware that they are using.

IRC is a great place for this, but many users walk away disappointed because they don’t understand the peculiarities of IRC culture or of getting help via IRC.

IRC is intricately linked with hacker culture, and one of the hallmarks of hacker culture is that efficiency is highly valued in communication. Many of the pleasantries that we consider politeness in everyday conversation are considered extraneous or even rude when applied over IRC, because hackers recognize that time is one of their most valuable and limited resources.

Do your homework first.

I can’t stress this enough. Eric S. Raymond goes into this in great detail in How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. The advice there sound quite blunt, but it’s how this really works. People will be more willing to help you if you show a willingness to help yourself. People will ignore you, correct you, or even display outright hostility to you for wasting their time on an answer you should have already found yourself.

Eric’s guide walks you through the basic steps to find answers on your own, but really, the minimum that people expect is that you’ve tried - and that you demonstrate that you’ve tried. Even if you are utterly clueless, demonstrate that you’ve made the effort, and someone will probably put you on the right track.

Don’t ask permission to ask a question.

So long as your question is reasonably on-topic, you should just ask it. No permission is required, the fact that you are in the right place is all the permission you need.

Don’t count on anyone to respond until you give them something worthy of a response.

Saying “Hello” in a channel, does not require a reply. You probably won’t get one. People may or not be awake. They are waiting for you to say something that is worthy of their attention.

Stick around and expect to wait a while.

IRC is a real-time communications medium, but most of us use it as somewhere between real-time and email. We leave IRC up and running so that we can see what’s happened while we were busy, and respond when we’re not.

Chances are the people who can help you are not immediately available - they will still eventually see your question, and if they know the answer, they’ll respond.

IF they don’t, they may either ask follow up questions to help them understand, or if they don’t have a clue, they might not respond at all.

Don’t paste blobs of text into IRC.