This "ew, people keep asking me for help" genre has been around for a long time, and I greatly dislike it. It's perfectly natural for people to turn to someone they know who knows about a topic. My father-in-law has answered my questions about cars for years. If there's something he can help with, he does; otherwise he tells me where I need to take it. Maybe I sometimes ask him for help that's actually a lot of work: that's not me being importunate, that's me not knowing about cars. Somehow he's never had any trouble helping me when he can and explaining when he can't. And when someone asks me about computers -- which they do all the time -- I'm delighted to return the favour. It's just not very hard to be a nice person who helps others.
What can sometimes be hard is setting boundaries in the relatively rare case of someone insisting that you help them to an inappropriate degree. Many of us admittedly need to learn how to do that better. But, a hint: whining in public about others' failure to respect the professional glory of your web designerness is no way to work on it. (Not picking on web designers here; programmers are worse.)
Edit: in fairness, the OP does offer some sensible hints (amid much self-centered snark) about polite ways to handle situations.
I agree; I hate these 'social faux pas' posts for web/graphic designers. I'm also increasingly beginning to hate this model of 'designer playing publisher' and abusing wordpress as a CMS for 'premium content' and buying/selling ad space. 1/10 times you end up with posts like, [insert quantity] things(outbound links) for [something].
The result is usually just a list of outbound links with some useless editorial commentary. Some sites (psdtuts, hongkiat) can pull it off, but others can not, which is easily discernible in how valueless each post is for who ever they're targeting (usually designers).
What can sometimes be hard is setting boundaries in the relatively rare case of someone insisting that you help them to an inappropriate degree. Many of us admittedly need to learn how to do that better. But, a hint: whining in public about others' failure to respect the professional glory of your web designerness is no way to work on it. (Not picking on web designers here; programmers are worse.)
Edit: in fairness, the OP does offer some sensible hints (amid much self-centered snark) about polite ways to handle situations.