Of course it is possible to be "nice" and earn a few bucks on the side by making it a paid request. But i.m.e. it is rarely worthwile, most start an argument after receiving the consulting offer which can only be ended by ignoring them after all. And those people are usually the bad kind of customers, complaining about rates, hours, wanting free side requests, "tax-free" invoices, etc.
I've tried this (for a short while) and will never do it again. Ignoring them is actually the kindest way to do things, to them (you prevent them from wasting their time) and mostly to yourself.
I think parent poster was never in a position where he really has to set priorities and never tried to be polite to 1000 people in a single day.
Funny, I thought this was a software orientated site. /s
Seriously though, copy/paste is fine. Autoresponders are fine, especially if noted as such in the email response. An automated response is better than no response.
Automated response is better if one expects confirmation of delivery and then more specific response.
I would be mad at a person that sets "will get back to you soon" as auto reply and never follows up. On the other hand what would be auto response when you don't want to respond? Something like "Hi, we got your message, don't expect hearing from us. Have a nice day!" that is even more rude.
Conceptually it is always a problem. This is how communication degrades and descends into chaos.
Most of the communication in the internet degrades, because information flow is lacking. If you answer politely, you can, when meeting in person, still convey an air of annoyance. You can signal the other person more than just what is being said. In written communication, this doesn't work. All the polite subtleties will be missed. All the cultural cues, like being overly polite or formal to signal distance, don't work because there are just too many cultures meeting, and you can't calibrate your interpretation to the other side like you do "at home".
This means that in the internet, you need to be more direct. You need to say what you mean. And if you need to dismiss somebody, you need to be explicitly dismissive. If somebody is rude, you need to be rude and tell them about their rudeness. Being polite for the sake of politeness is misleading, inducing the other side to continue their errorneous behaviour up to the point where things really degrade into an unpleasant situation.
From a technical perspective: Ignoring leaves the loop open. I don't know: - if you ignore it on purpose - or if you don't want to solve it or - or if you don't have time or - or if you just missed it ...
That's when I would re-send the message or do something else. A Win-Win would be sending a small "won't-fix" or whatever.
Often that's what you want! Maybe I don't want to reject your bug report outright, maybe I'll get around to it in a few weeks or months or years. Or not, I dunno.
I've had my own issues and bugfix PRs on small projects ignored, that's fine. Nobody should ever have the expectation of a response on that kind of project.
Ignoring: for the maintainer: open loop or maybe hidden closed loop (e.g. afraid of confrontation); for the requester: open loop.
The intention of saying no is a closed loop.
> Nobody should ever have the expectation...
Yes, but that's not a pragmatic solution. People sometimes DO have the expectation.
After a couple of years of politely declining, it gets tiring. It's OK to ignore people. It's not rude at all! I care more about my own free time (that I spend writing open source software) than I care about being polite to people ignoring instructions and expecting us to work for free FOR THEM.
When you are in a semi-public position or vaguely popular, you can have 1000 persons a day asking you for stuff. No you can't politely refuse because not only you don't have time to write the refusal, but you don't have time to even consider the offer. Ask any pretty girl what happens on tinder. It's the literall same in a professional setting if you have a semi-valuable or public position.
Then you will realize being ignored is the default behavior as you get into more "valuable" circles or look for more "valuable" ressources in general, and that it's the burden of the "asker" to make himself interesting to the person he wants an answer from. No one owes you his time because you exist. You will understand that because there will be 100s of candidates looking for the same ressource than (speaking very generally). That's when you will become less sensitive (or you will become frustrated as why the world is soo not nice with you).
Good luck and no offense
I an strongly in camp of "it is OK to ask for features and report bugs", but it is only as long as it does not create dutys on the side of maintener. If it would create such duty, then I would think prior should not send those unless super important.
Pls, it is easy for many people to overwhelm one maibtennar.
Making some software public does not mean that they are entitled to any operational or emotional consideration on your part. Having to 'refuse' costs emotional energy and karma, that bank is not infinite.
If you don't want to take inquiries, put that on the front page and ignore everything.
No feature requests: Author(s) do not wish to "politely refuse" every wild idea you might have.
No Support requests: Author(s) do not wish to "politely refuse" every time you need hand holding with your implementation of hello world.
No Pull Requests: Author(s) will collaborate within a restricted group and do not wish to "politely refuse" your t-shirt contest contributions.
No amount of README pleading, CONTRIBUTING.md or issue templates can stop the class of people which don't read and don't care. If you open an issue on my project, at the top, you'll get a message explaining that, as shocking as it may be, "debugging requires information." Then there's a checklist of 5-6 items which are the bare minimum required for me to start debugging this app which runs on numerous operating systems and platforms.
Despite all of this, about 20% of all issues ever opened in the project have blanket ignored the expectations of the project. The coding part of open source I still love. The administration of the project, and endlessly begging people to follow the guidelines, necessitates occasional sabbaticals to recover my sanity.
There is a better approach and it's simply: politely refuse.
People intruding the private email? No problem. Politely refuse, and offer private consultancy at $very_high_price, with alternative, to open a bug in the bug tracker, making explicit that there is no commitment.
Something important to keep in mind is also that by establishing ignoring as a policy, one will never learn to politely refuse.
I'm a maintaner as well, and I speak for personal experience.