[alanpost]

We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them.

My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience.

I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.

[nopacience]

Support over IRC is historical in open source.

irc.perl.org -- perl language support and development

irc.mozilla.org -- mozila related support and development

irc.freenode.net has many support channels:

#mysql

#postgresql

#vim

#emacs

#nodejs

#css

#javascript

#python

#manjaro -- manjaro linux distro

#archlinux -- arch linux distro

#freebsd

#linux

#vuejs -- horrible support (frontend channel)

#angularjs -- horrible support (frontend channel)

#elasticsearch

#sqlite

#xen

#docker

#git

and the list goes on. many great people there :)

[dikiaap]

#vuejs is created by Evan You. As a topic on the channel, he seems abandoned the channel and suggest people go to Gitter for active support.