The Other Side of TheoryCrafting

It's a pretty universal law of the internet that where-ever you find someone voluntarily doing a website/forum/etc, there will be people that demand more. In WoW circles, it's the TC types that get this more often than not, and these forums would be another example.

Lets look at EJ first. There are a number of rules which the forum operates around. These may be a bit more restrictive than most forums, but the upside of this is that there is a much higher "signal to noise ratio" (which means there's less random crap getting in the way of useful posts). Sometimes users don't learn from the infractions, which invariably means they get banned from repeated rule violations, but on other occasions they react... aggressively... to the infractions (and warnings, which are 0 point infractions). These result in the somewhat amusing (to the older members & benefactors bar residents) "Mod Sass" infractions & bans. You can search in The Banhammer to see some examples.

From the TheoryCrafters side of things, it can be a bit frustrating to spend many hours working on something only to have Random Person X come along and say "why aren't you doing this?". Sometimes these suggestions are good, sometimes not, but there are a few occasions where the not-so-good suggestions have resulted in rather abrasive comments from the posters when their suggestions are turned down/dismissed.
An example of this occurred earlier in the month on WoW Warlock DPS Spreadsheet. When Leulier stopped developing his lock spreadsheet, Bakka picked up where he left off. Releases have stopped due to outrage by one user in particular when Bakka said he would not be maintaining two different copies of the sheet, in order to give support for Excel 2003.

In both of these situations, there are demanding people who expect others to bend over backwards to provide them with everything they want. As with the real world (maybe I should capitalise the R & W there), this sort of behaviour is generally not tolerated for very long. This is quite possibly why these forums are so popular, yet equally despised by a certain portion of the WoW gamer population (hint: this latter group tends to consist of the demanding types that didn't get what they wanted and were banned). In the same vein as the forums, treat your theorycrafters, spreadsheet authors, guide writers with a bit more respect, otherwise they too may decide that it's not worth it and "throw in the towel". This will result in fewer informative posts/blogs/etc, fewer spreadsheets to rate your dps/gear, and a poorer online community because of it.