I’ve been posting questions on ERPNext as I’ve been developing my app for our company, but most of my questions never resolve into an answer, and many of them never receive a response. When I’m hunting the forums for an answer, I see many other posts with the same result.
Where does the community receive the best help? Are the forums the best place, or is there another place - an IRC channel or Discord server, for example?
This is probably the biggest issue with any of the open source ERP’s out there. You’ll find the conditions you’ve mentioned for all of them. Lots of unanswered questions, or answers coming in loooong after they were required (weeks or months later).
I think this is primarily because we’re operating in a niche (ERPNext/Frappe) within a niche (open source ERP’s) and the relative user base is small when compared to other open source projects with larger user base and larger demand.
What’s the solution? For it me it’s been to invest more time learning Frappe more by using it and testing as much as I can, reviewing documentation (https://docs.erpnext.com/), and occassionally coming across a thread here that helps me out of the current issue at hand. Then, hopefully, I have less issues and need to ask less questions over time. Sometimes, maybe I can even answer some 
Another alternative would be to pay someone to help you with specific issues or general training (make a list of questions you have). Maybe you can use Upwork or something like that - there’s lot of freelancers there with Erpnext and Frappe experience in their profiles.
Of course you can also pay for Enterprise Support from ERPNext team as well. For me, those costs are prohibitive until we determine this will be a long term solution for us. I’m mostly just testing it as a solution at this stage.
I use iredmail as well and in the forum posts if you like the answer you can pay them $5 via paypal. I think we should try that here to see if that helps get some responses and money flowing.
@ebsjbulcher First, sorry that you are having to work so hard for answers… Others have pointed out that we are a pretty focused group.
In my experience, this is the best place for information because it is searchable and threaded. But there is also a Telegram group here: Telegram: Contact @erpnexthelp
Telegram seems like a very odd place FOSS support. Is that an official channel, or ad hoc?
Well, it’s different, but it works in its own way. I think people are likely to have Telegram open as a Chat/IM client and they can see notifications in real time. I only go to Discuss once a day.
It is NOT “official” but the Frappe team knows about it and are frequently seen there.
If the community had a singular place called “home”, I believe these forums would be it. If you need help, this is your best starting point. Whenever I have questions/issue, I almost always begin by performing a Search here.
)All solutions suffer from the same challenges, of course.
) that People-With-Answers are watching…and also have the time to write a helpful reply.