Many users come to IRC looking for help. This is great: IRC is a great resource for users, and it's good to know that there is a direct contact to a number of OpenLayers users. However, in order to use this resource effectively, it is important to realized a number of the 'Best Practices' that open source developers follow when participating on IRC. ("A User's time is limited: A Developer's, doubly so.")

• Don't ask to ask, just ask. This means that you shouldn't ask "Can I ask a question about OpenLayers here?" It's always better to just ask your question.
• Give enough context and information about your question that people don't have to ask you any questions to give a useful answer. If you're having a problem with event handling, state that! It is much more likely that another IRC user will respond if they can tell if they can answer your question without putting any more effort into it: many questions can be answered by a simple example or link to documentation, but without context, it's impossible to know.
• Pinging someone by nickname explicitly without request by that user is rude. There are more than 50 people on the OpenLayers IRC channel -- most of them are busy doing other things, and you typing their name into the channel is like tapping them on the shoulder in a crowded room. This is fine if they know that you're looking for them, but having a stranger walk up to you and tap you on the shoulder while you're talking to someone else is annoying at parties: the same can apply to IRC.
• Don't paste more than 3 lines into the IRC channel: instead, paste your content at http://rafb.net/paste/ and paste a link to the channel.

Very Bad:

  <newuser> crschmidt: Can I ask you a question about OpenLayers?
  <crschmidt> *facepalm*

Bad:

  <newuser> crschmidt: Do you know anything about how ExtJS works with OpenLayers?
  <crschmidt> Nope.

Better:

  <newuser> Does anyone have experience with how ExtJS works with OpenLayers?

Best:

  <newuser> I'm experiencing a problem where an Ext draggable window is getting 'stuck' when dragging over an 
    OpenLayers Map. My code looks like this: http://rafb.net/p/12jk34.html , and you can see the problem 
    demonstrated at http://myfancyurl.example.com/ .  Does anyone know if the combination of ext event handling 
    and OpenLayers has some solution for this, or has at least experienced this problem before?
  <crschmidt> If you set the fallThrough property on the map, it will allow events to 'fall through' to the 
    rest of the page, which may help solve your problem.
    http://dev.openlayers.org/apidocs/files/OpenLayers/Map-js.html#OpenLayers.Map.fallThrough has more information.