First, thanks for Caddy! 
Is there an IRC channel that folks tend to hang out on?
Thanks,
Robert
Yeah that should be cool. Sad that the chat have been closed
We won’t open an official “chat” venue because it loses too much content that can’t be searched by future readers. But I guess I can’t stop anyone from creating their own IRC channels.
These forums update in real-time so it has the same effect as chat as well as the benefit of being searchable.
Feel free to hang out here as much as you please. 
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I totally understand - we use slack, but because we don’t pay for it we lose history. Pain in the behind.
In case anyone is interested, there appears to be 2 channels on freenode, #caddy and #caddyserver. If anything interesting happens over there I’ll post it here for posterity.
I just joined these channels and they both dead. 
At the very least we should pick one of those channels! Two is too many.
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I agree with you, I wanted to see how many people where in them. Why did you withdraw your post? It was a perfect valid response IMO.
I just saw that this thread was 4 years old, of course those channels are dead if the people writing Caddy haven’t been participating for all of that time. I was going to let sleeping dogs lie, but I guess this is a conversation worth having.
For the record, I do think that real-time communication accomplishes something that asynchronous communication doesn’t, among other things a certain feeling of community. At the same time, I understand completely the Caddy maintainers not wanting to answer the same questions in real time over and over again, having everything searchable in the forum should reduce repetitive questions from people who bother to search before asking.
I’m not sure what the solution is, aside from growing the community until there are more people involved in making Caddy who support the idea of a public IRC channel + Matrix chat room or whatever.
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I will wait to see if someone is active in there over next few days and if not I will just come out. I have got answers by searching the forums but answers would probably be quicker if there was a live chat of some sort with everyone including users where in IRC.
IRC is coming back especially likes of Freenode with 50,000+ channels now active.
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We do have a semi-active Discord server, but it’s not run by anyone from the Caddy core team:
We do also have a Slack that’s by invite only for core team members and others aiding with the project in various ways (core development, distribution, plugin development, sponsors, partners, etc).
That said, I have to say that by far the best way to get help is to ask questions on these forums. We have a thread template that saves a lot of time in trying to communicate the problem the users are facing, and with code block formatting and threading, it’s much easier to have more focused back-and-forth rather than conversations stepping on eachother in a linear chatroom.
Asking questions here also makes the answers be visible publicly forever rather than getting lost in the noise in a chatroom. We rather give help that won’t just help a single person, but also potentially many others in the future via searching.
If you require private help for whatever reason, then you should consider paying for a support plan if you rely on Caddy for your business:
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Just to back up what @francislavoie is saying, I can’t understate how much value I believe the forums provide. Archives and searchability are a big deal.
Even the silly, short, strange, noob, and dumb questions are so valuable. They help people come to grips with the human side of human-computer interaction. Everyone makes mistakes. Beginners really benefit from seeing those mistakes happen. That’s less likely to happen in an ephemeral chat channel.
These forums update in real time.
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@francislavoie that’s a very good explination. 
noted.
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Going to close this years-old thread, since our mind is made up and with good justification. Thanks!
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