The PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.
The problem is that very many people are not able to google and then ask in IRC. On the other side (the regulars), all they see every day is a torrent of "stupid noobs".
And I totally understand everyone who either retires from answering questions or turning into a sarcastic a..hole towards noobs.
There are plenty of others who've had positive experiences as well.
And those "caustic individuals" have a LOT to share if you're willing to engage in an open and healthy way.
I am outing, specifically, Terenko. In all my years as a forum contributor/mod I don't think I've encountered such a poisonous dick as that person.
I know you do a lot of good work for the PHP community, along with Gordon and many others, but, my friend terenko is truly a knob end and sadly encourages others who are up and coming PHP debutants to behave the same.
It really made me weep as a diamond mod why you guys tolerated his snide comments and activities.
Today, we have the ability to kick-ban. Awesome. But he's also calmed down a lot. And is seen as a resource.
It's gotten a lot better over the years, but there is still work to be done in there. But now we're starting to get the tools to handle it. Which is awesome.
If I'd gotten a message from yourself or Gordon about this kinda thing (out of band), I knew who you guys were, you are the life and soul of the PHP community on SO. We'd have acted, you're too good to lose.
But...as mods we kept a fairly light touch with regards to stomping into chat rooms and reading the riot act (even politely) because otherwise we'd be meta'd as Nazis's, Fascists and Stalinists. I remember many occasions us being lambasted for trying to "moderate" out unpleasantness (in the PHP and C++ rooms), I eventually gave up my mod diamond because I'd run out of "trying to be nice and diplomatic" energy.
Such is the way of curating a community.
I used to sit in the PHP chat room and become quite depressed that his attitude became the standard.
You know something, as a developer/ops for a web hoster I was about to throw my weight into the PHP project back in ~2010, i.e. contributions, bug reporting from live bulk hosted environments (we probably host around 12k busy PHP sites on Linux and IIS - sure not huge, we're a business focused hoster, uptime and rapid support is paramount [and we do ASP.NET, Perl, Classic ASP], but for a ten man company with some heavily customised environments it's a chunk of work), that kinda thing...but that room turned me off (that and the PHP dev mailing list - but that's another story).