% Getting Help from the Community
% John Gabriele

The 3 main places to get help with Clojure, in no particular order, are:

  * IRC (#clojure on freenode)
  * the mailing list / discussion group:
    <http://groups.google.com/group/clojure> (Note: messages from new
    members are moderated and may take a little while to appear.)
  * [StackOverflow Clojure
    questions](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/clojure)

When using IRC, if you've got example code you wish to ask about, you
might post it to the Clojure community's very own
[Refheap](https://www.refheap.com) paste-bin.

There are at least 2 bots usually residing on #clojure, and they
both can evaluate code for you:

clojurebot
  : Usage example: &nbsp;&nbsp; `,(+ 1 1)`
lazybot
  : Usage example: &nbsp;&nbsp; `&(+ 1 1)`
  : Usage example with surrounding text: &nbsp;&nbsp; `this is ##(println "just") a test`

If you want to send someone on IRC a message, but they're not logged
in at the moment, lazybot can save the message and deliver it next
time they're on IRC.  For example, to send amalloy such a message:

    $mail amalloy Thanks for the help earlier!

If someone queues such a message for *you*, you retrieve it (as
lazybot will tell you) by messaging lazybot like so:

    /msg lazybot mail

To see when the last time someone sent a message to the list, do:

    $seen their-nick

Logs for #clojure are available at:

  * <http://clojure-log.n01se.net/>
  * <http://logs.lazybot.org/irc.freenode.net/%23clojure>

And, as always --- regardless of venue --- courtesy
counts. `:)`