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- Be patient. Even though someone is connected to the chat, they may not be watching it at any given moment. People are in different time zones and sometimes do other things including sleep! Often, if you include their name/nick/ID in a message, they will have configured their chat client to alert them.
- Don't send a message to someone with just "Hi" to try to get their attention. If they are online, write your full message/question to them and they will respond when they can.
- Avoid asking questions to specific people when possible. Anyone may be able to help, and if you exclude them by only asking a single person, you may miss a better or faster answer. But if no body responds to you after a while, then you can mention irc names of people such that their irc clients can alert them, just in case they were not paying attention.
- Don't repeat your message or question multiple times. If you find that no one's able to help you with an answer, consider posting your question or issue on OpenMRS Talk.
- Be considerate when sharing lots of text. Don't paste multiple lines into your chat client as multiple messages -- it might get you automatically banned. Don't link to screenshots of text error messages, either -- use gist.github.com or pastebin.com to upload the text in question.
- Praise in public, criticize in private. Public criticism is rarely helpful in getting people to change their behavior or tone. Consider sending a private message.
- Don't forget to search. You may find an answer faster by searching Google.com or search.openmrs.org with your issue(s). It may have already been discussed in our chat or on OpenMRS Talk.
- Remember that both our IRC and Telegram chats are logged so other people can catch up on conversations. Once you send something, it's out there for the world to see!
- Be friendly and have fun! Non-serious light conversation is allowed as long as it's not interrupting other important issues.
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