How can you draw a line without knowing who you are talking to in person? Is the person just someone who wants a quick answer, or do they deep inside wish to know how the answer works?

Ahh, there's the rub. The answer is: you can't know.

Unless the poster prefaces a question with some biographical information ("I've been C programming for 15 years, and just can't get the hang of ____ in Perl") or you've met the poster in person -- you really can't know.

For this, fall back on your customer service training: give them what they asked for, and then lead them down the path to further knowledge<super>*</super>. If they ask a (suspected) X-Y question, answer X and make the suggestion that Y might be more appropriate and conventional. If they ask a direct question give them a direct answer, be brief, and then politely leave them with a pointer for more information. If the direct answer is too long and involved to really go into tell them that and leave the pointer.

And for chromatic, there's an easy solution to the frustration of having to answer Yet Another HTML-parsing-with-regexps or CGI-module-should-have-been-used question: don't answer. Tackle the harder questions. There's plenty of monks here who'll jump in and take these questions because they've seen you answer them a dozen times or more. They're waiting to say something but the questions that they can answer have been jumped on already. They get to post and be helpful, you get to spend more time on interesting questions. Everyone's happy.

Sometimes, if you really want to be helpful, contact the poster out-of-band (e-mail) and ask more questions. THEN go back and answer to the level they require. (Of course, putting a note in the post with the additional information gathered.)

None of this is hard, none of this requires more effort than is going on now. You won't offend, no-one will be driven off, and everyone gets what they want. Changing the perception of the Perl Community will take time, and a lot of attitude adjusting.

<super>*</super>The same training that tells you not worry about the customer that complained about the service, but to worry about the dozens that said nothing...