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Getting help
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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* 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.

We also maintain a community wiki_ for Varnish, there you will find information on planned events, meetings, current backlog, trouble tickets ,  and links to resources and documentation.

.. XXX: we should introduce the wiki (if we care about it) before
.. we start referring to it (below). Make a wiki chapter?

Trouble Tickets
===============

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.

.. XXX: Not sure what you want with the last sentence above. benc

We instead track suggestions and feature ideas in our `"Future_Feature" wiki page`_,
and through user support via email and IRC.

Commercial Support
==================

The following companies offer commercial Varnish support, and are listed
here for your convenience.  If you want your company listed here, drop
an email to phk@FreeBSD.org.

	Varnish Software
	sales@varnish-software.com

	UPLEX
	info@uplex.de

.. _mailman: https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/mailman/listinfo
.. _pastebin: https://gist.github.com/
.. _"Future_Feature" wiki page: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/Future_Feature
.. _wiki: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac
