Good article, good discussion.

I always try to have as much patience as possible with questions on these forums. I have to agree with Jeff that obvious interview/test questions have to be handled differently than "real" questions, but I try to err on the side of answering where I shouldn't rather than not answering where I should.

I don't really have a problem with arrogant questions. My biggest problem in forums like this is when something in the question isn't clear, and I ask for clarification, and either never get an answer, or get something that doesn't actually clarify anything at all. I understand that some/many people posting here don't speak English as their primary language (nor SQL as their second language), but there have been a few times where I've had to give up on a thread because I simply couldn't get some critical clarification of what was being asked for.

Where I have a BIG problem is, however, none of the things that have been mentioned yet. It's when someone comes here, asks for help in performance tuning a complex stored procedure, gets an answer, and immediately follows that up with a dozen more of a similar nature, all requiring hours of work to get fixed up. It doesn't happen often, but it has happened a few times. There's a big difference between going to a forum for help, learning something, and moving on with it, and going to a forum for free work on complex projects.

Outside of that, I love this forum (and related sites). I've been away from it for a couple of months, because of mad-crazy workload, but I'm back as much as I can be.

If I'd known such sites existed while I was learning SQL, I would have had a much easier time of it on a number of the projects I took on!

So I try to help as much as I can, while I learn as much as I can. Half the time, answering someone's question teaches me new things about subjects I would never have thought of, but which are definitely useful!

So, yeah, good article on a good subject. Keep the forums rollin'!