How do you answer basic programming questions on a forum for a specific project?

Question

I'm currently in the process of becoming a maintainer of a small open source project (a Facebook toolkit), and of course, one of the responsibilities is to answer user questions on our forum. While I'm happy to help users learn how to work with our toolkit and deal with issues they may run into (which may eventually indicate bugs in our code), a significant amount of the questions seem to have less to do with our toolkit specifically, and more to do with knowing how to program in general.

I'd like to help the people asking these questions, but I don't really have the time to be a full-on programming teacher. I don't want to just ignore them. They're not asking to be spoon-fed everything; they just don't know where to begin to solve their problems. Is there some way I can point them in the right direction without offending them, and without spending all my time trying to teach our users general programming skills?

Answer 1

Make a FAQ page or a tutorial covering some of the basics, that will eliminate quite a lot of questions.

Answer 2

Send them here! Seriously, though, the "perceived value" of your answer has a lot to do with your attitude. Tell them exactly what you said in your second paragraph: that you don't have the bandwidth to help as much as you'd like, but you can suggest some very helpful web sites, books, or other references. "STFW" is acceptable, provided it's phrased appropriately, and you might even suggest search terms.