If you ever file an “Information Request” type JIRA issue with the Asterisk project you’ll find it automatically closed with a comment pointing you to other resources. This is due to the fact that the issue tracker is for tracking issues, and is not a help mechanism. The number of people who monitor JIRA issues is limited and in general it is not a great resource for help. Since this has happened quite a few times recently I thought I’d do a blog post about the ways you can get community help.

The Asterisk project provides the following avenues for receiving help:

The community forum at https://community.asterisk.org/ is a public forum which uses the same user account as JIRA for login. It is quite active and full of people providing answers and helping with things. You can also use the search mechanism to see if a similar issue to yours has come up before and read the resulting conversation. Note that threads are automatically closed 30 days after the last post, so if something is related but old you’ll need to start a new thread.

The IRC channel #asterisk on chat.libera.net provides a real time mechanism for interacting with people. There are some individuals there who provide help, but note that noone is under any obligation to respond to you or to help. It is also polite to wait a period of time before giving up in case others are busy at the time.

Last but not least are the mailing lists on https://lists.digium.com/ which have been around for many years. This is best for people who prefer email, but does not see too much activity these days. The community forums instead are more active!

In all of these cases please be as detailed and specific as possible with what you are seeking help with. Simply stating “it doesn’t work” doesn’t help people help you, and is more likely to drive them away from offering help.

Hope this helps if you encounter an issue and are looking for help!