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I'm pretty sure the help vampire phenomenon is an example of the lmgtfy phenomenon and not a real problem (except in rare cases)

• ubernostrum 17y ago
  I've personally dealt with "help vampires"; they're not rare, and they tend (in my experience) to fall into two groups: 1. People whose attitude is "I will remain as ignorant of as many things as possible for as long as possible". Try to point them to documentation which covers broad/fundamental concepts, or explain them yourself, and the reply you'll get is "I don't need to know all that, I just need to know how to do X". Learning enough to find your own way is, I've been told, simply a massive waste of time. Of course, later they'll be back with "now I need to know how to do Y", and again stubbornly insisting that there's no need to learn generalities... 2. "plz send me the code" -- people who won't even learn the specifics of a task at hand, but just keep badgering until someone hands them fully-working code. Point them at appropriate documentation and, nine times out of ten, they copy/paste the first code sample on the page and come back to say it didn't work. I see, on average, about one or two of these every day on IRC and mailing lists. Unfortunately, these behaviors tend to be successful in the short term: sooner or later someone will step up and give the vampire what he wants, and the cycle will start all over again. Long-term, I don't know; I tend to be liberal with the /ignore, and I don't keep track of whether these people later evolve away from these behaviors.