I don't think anyone is going to think less of you for going to real people with your problems. It's specifically when people go into a channel full of stranger

I don't think anyone is going to think less of you for going to real people with your problems. It's specifically when people go into a channel full of strangers and ask things like "how can I do a find with a many to many in rails" that I'm talking about. I guess it's the sense of entitlement that's annoying. Why would you expect strangers to help you when you can't even be bothered to state the question in a way that would make things easy for them? I realise english isn't everyone's first language, but I have seen people who speak very broken english take great pains to explain their problems clearly as best they can, it isn't an excuse. And no, I don't ever get snarky. People with stupid questions should get ignored at worst. In these cases, the questions are usually so trivial that being convincingly rude would take more effort than just solving the problem. This is a better link to post in these situations: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html In fact, the bot in #rubyonrails cites this link when prompted with !ask