# Getting help

Getting hold of the gang behind Varnish is pretty straight forward, we try to help out as much as time permits and have tried to streamline this process as much as possible.

But before you grab hold of us, spend a moment composing your thoughts and formulate your question. From our perspective there is nothing as pointless as simply telling us “Varnish does not work for me” with no further information. This does not give us any relevant information to use when trying to figure out whats wrong.

And before you even do that, do a couple of searches to see if your question is already answered, if it has been, you will get your answer much faster that way.

## IRC Channel

The most immediate way to get hold of us is to join our IRC channel:

> #varnish on server irc.linpro.no

The main timezone of the channel is Europe work hours.

If you can explain your problem in a few clear sentences, without too much copy&paste, IRC is a good way to try to get help. If you do need to paste log files, VCL and so on, please use a pastebin service.

If the channel is all quiet, try again some time later, we do have lives, families and jobs to deal with also.

You are more than welcome to just hang out, and while we don’t mind the occasional intrusion from the real world into our flow, we try and keep it mostly on topic, and please don’t paste random links unless they are really funny, spectacular and intelligent.

## Mailing Lists

Subscribing or unsubscribing to our mailing lists is handled through mailman.

If you are going to use Varnish, subscribing to our varnish-announce mailing list is a very good idea. The typical pattern is that people spend some time getting Varnish running, and then more or less forget about it. Therefore the announce list is a good way to be reminded about new releases, bugs or potential (security) vulnerabilities.

The varnish-misc mailing list is for general banter, questions, suggestions, ideas and so on. If you are new to Varnish it may pay off to subscribe to it, simply to have an ear to the telegraph-pole and potentially learn some smart tricks. This is also a good place to ask for help with more complex issues, that may require file-chunks, references to files and/or long explanations.

Make sure to pick a good subject line, and if the subject of the thread changes, please change the subject to match, some of us deal with hundreds of emails per day, after spam-filters, and we need all the help we can get to pick the interesting ones.

The varnish-dev mailing list is used by the developers and is usually quite focused on source-code and such. Everybody on the -dev list is also on -misc, so cross-posting only serves to annoy those people.

## Trouble Tickets

Our bugtracker lives on GitHub, but please do not open a trouble ticket, unless you have spotted an actual bug in Varnish. Ask on IRC first if you are in doubt.

The reason for this policy, is to avoid bugs being drowned in a pile of other issues, feature suggestions for future releases, and double postings of calls for help from people who forgot to check back on already opened Tickets.

New ideas may get parked in our GitHub wiki, until we have time for them, or until we have thought out a good design.

## Commercial Support

If you need commercial support, there are companies which offer that and you can find a list on our homepage..