Why should I not email the developers with my questions?¶

Dear users,

Thank you for your interest in CHIRP!

Most people have the same questions over and over again. This is very common and to be expected with a complicated system that may not be intuitive for every person. Further, the same sorts of hardware, driver, etc difficulties plague most folks. It is very unusual to encounter a situation completely unique to one computer system, radio, etc.

Answering personal emails takes a lot of time, and in the case of repeated questions, results in a significant investment that could be otherwise spent actually fixing bugs and adding new features. The mailing list is full of "power users" who have already hit the issues you are hitting now, and/or they have been "lurking" on the mailing list for quite some time and have "seen it all". These users can provide a valuable service to the developers by fielding common questions and problems, allowing the developers to focus on ... development.

If you still feel that you have found an actual problem, have stumped the folks on the list, and feel that developer intervention is required, please use the issue tracker. The issue tracker is the mechanism by which you should communicate with developers, instead of emailing them directly. The issue tracker helps us correlate a bug report or feature request with the actual fix in the code, and also helps us avoid duplicated effort by multiple people working on the same bug without realizing it.

The developers of CHIRP are volunteers, who spend their nights and weekends creating a free tool with unparalleled functionality. Please help them be as productive as possible by not forcing them to spend time answering requests for personalized support directly over email.

Thanks,

The CHIRP development team