Well, I feel a little bit offended by this statement
We (a couple of ‘supporting people’) chose to compile a manifest and refer to that on any request that is clearly lacking the information that is required to help or that is showing that the poster is lacking to show effort himself.
That’s not as impolite as your “RTFM …” and I believe it hits the sweet spot.
We do expect any user, especially newbies, to show effort and respect. We’re not responsible for software problems because we didn’t write it, and we’re not responsible for situations users maneuvered into themselves despite of warnings given, so they don’t have a right to demand help. But an increasing number of people thinks they do.
And if some answer is written in the docs or there have been threads about it that we remember, yes the bottom line is we do expect users to use the search function and find that before asking.
And yes, the number of people unwilling to search and try for themselves has increased, and these we in fact aren’t willing to spend our time on (we’re also just volunteers).