This sometimes seems to be mercenary and is not well recieved by the users of the forum. Last year I practically gave up offering advice in a VB forum because the people who frequented it thought that the only reason I was there was to tout my wares.
To be honest, I always hesitate to answer "if you're interested in a commercial solution..." and think more than twice about posting a link to my business site but recently I've begun to wonder why people are so anti a good solution.
Looking at the situation logically, the kinds of questions I answer with a commercial offering are the ones that would start out with "Well, you need to build yourself a small nuclear power station. First mine some uranium and then..." followed by a couple of pages of complex overview. These are not trivial questions then and hence have no trivial answer.
What I really don't understand is when someone pops up on line and demands a FREE-SOURCE-CODE-INCLUDED tool that does just exactly what they want and moans like the clappers if someone suggests they should pay a few bucks registration fee or even buy a developer license
Work is money and money is work. If someone is faced with a weeks work figuring out how to do a specific task and can get the answer for a thirty buck registration fee then how can they be so indignant when someone says "Ok, I'll save you a weeks worth of finding out how to do this yourself in exchange for the cost of one hour of your precious time.
If it were me, and it frequently has been, I'd jump at the chance and register there and then. Then again, like my dad says "Theres nought so strange as folk"
