Personally, I believe this misses the point partially.<p>The point of IRC with a bouncer is to have a way of combining synchronous (live chatting) with asynchronous communication (highlights and reading up logs).<p>&gt; What to do instead? Use IRC when you&#x27;re actually there, leave when you&#x27;re not. If you join IRC and you have a question for someone who is not there, send email to the project list (with a good subject!). Consider sending to the list even if the person who you think will be able to answer your question is present in IRC.<p>Many small projects don&#x27;t actually have a mailing list; the closest thing to it is some kind of issue tracker, which comes with its own set of problems. Additionally, e-mail incurs a seemingly heavy time penalty to send -- some kind of greeting and valediction always must be present.<p>On IRC, doing so is amounts to almost wasting everyone&#x27;s time if you have an issue to bring up. Of course, these kinds of cultural things vary between IRC channels, and these are just my two cents on this.