This seems odd to me, as I'm am usually in there during the same exact hours. I would imagine this is just a mere coincidence that you saw no activity. Although keep in mind, some of us actually have to do real work during those hours, so reponse times may not be the greatest. To be brutally honest, even most of my activity there appears after work hours (to the tune of 9pm EST or later) Also keep in mind the time zone thing again. Zope is international baby! ;-) Another affect on all this is, that there are quite a few "newbie" users in the channel as well. It may be that the userbase that was hanging around at the time you asked questions simply just couldn't answer. Now, I'm not trying to say that IRC is better than the mailing list or vice versa, I'm just saying, don't let the initial lack of response leave a sour taste in your mouth. The IRC channel is very worthwhile, and quite a few questions are answered. On 27 Mar 2001 12:25:23 -0500, John R. Daily wrote:

...

Are you sure you've been in the IRC channel? I don't want to sound demeaning here, but questions are answered all the time, and in a quite timely manner most times. If you received no response, I either assume you weren't where you thought you were, you only stuck around a matter of minutes, or that no one was around to answer due to timezone issues.

I visited the channel three times during eastern US business hours, and remained on the channel for at least 30 minutes each time.

Two of those three times I asked a question; the third time I just idled.

All three times I saw questions asked by others; none of them were ever answered in the time I watched.

Perhaps those three times were flukes, but one of my co-workers typically sees the same thing, although he has actually seen questions answered today.

-John