it boils down to your own fault

Yes, I know and I fully agree with you! (BTW, I am the OP).

if a "thank you" isn't enough payment, don't take the job

It seems that I have not explained clearly my point of view as all the replies have missed it. Probably because I have mixed a rant and a meditation.

I am not saying that a "Thank you" is not good enough for me as the helper.

What I am saying is that for the help requester, sometimes a "Thank you" is not enough in order to be polite. There is a subtle but big difference.

As a community, it seems that we have forgotten that good old custom of rewarding those that help us, specially when they do it at our request and in a fully altruistic manner.

Anyway, as I said before my real intention was to make other monks aware that when they ask somebody for help they are actually using his time to solve their problems, they should try to not abuse it!

How to be grateful for it later is up to them, their politeness, education and what their mother toll them to do in those cases :-)

Yeah, that is difficult. So we have a couple of different kinds of persons in this equation. I can name a handful of hackers, some high profile, pretty much all monks, who have sunk at least an hour or two on my behalf; mailing lists or bug reports. If I had to hire them or repay them, realistically, I'd be out a couple thousand bucks. This doesn’t even cover some of the help I've received here which in a couple of cases probably equalled $1,000 of my time in a single response.

But I'm not a regular end user, I'm a dev with a CPAN presence, I post tutorials here and there, and I'm a good citizen as far as bug reports and patches go. So, maybe I've saved the Perl community ten times more than I've cost it. When ikegami or creamygoodness or stvn or BrowserUK (update: fixed amusing typo) or any number of other monks and Perl folk spend an hour or two helping me they're helping others indirectly by solving problems I'm not so hot with so I have more time to solve the problems I am good at and spread that around.

Other users… I don't know. Well, now that I think of it, I read a fun article about guessers and askers recently. The gist being some people ask, not worrying about the answer, and don't think anything of it, others guess first and only ask if they think the answer is yes. You and I are guessers. It makes us polite because we don't like to impose. We won't even ask unless we think the answer is yes. This makes askers rub us wrong because when they ask, we're constrained by our attitude to either say yes or we resent being forced to say no because we don't like to be “impolite.” The asker has no concept of the perceived impropriety. He just asks, not having much of an expectation either way.

I'm all for peer pressure to be considerate though. I do think this stuff equals out pretty well already and some of the touchy spots are plain misunderstandings and differences in personality. It would be nice to see a rewards/beer/credits system on some sort of social coding site… It would take the governments of the world a few years to catch on how to tax it. :)

(update: fixed a few typos.)

Hear, hear. It would be nice if there were some way to e.g. send somebody a 6-pack of beer for doing what amounts to a favor. This sort of micro-barter-thank-you system is the way a lot of things work in the meatworld. It would feel awkward giving someone cash for what amounts to a small favor, just as it may seem awkward donating some nominal sum via a donate button-- how much is appropriate? $5? $10? What is someone's time actually worth? A small material gift on the other hand connotes respect. There doesn't seem to be a good internet analog yet. Maybe there's a business model here...