Most pools are <abbr title="Pay Per Last N Shares">PPLNS</abbr> pools, which means that you only get paid when a miner on the pool finds a block. If the pool you are mining on is small, this can take a few days to weeks.
An active Monero mining community on Reddit is [/r/MoneroSupport](https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroSupport/). You can also join [#monero-pools on Libera](https://web.libera.chat/?channel=#monero-pools) or Matrix (#monero-pools:monero.social).
[Consider using Tor to connect to the pool](https://xmrig.com/docs/miner/tor) (or to a hidden service pool like HashVault, RespectXMR and MoneroOcean). This hides mining activity from your ISP, and prevents the pool from knowing who you are.