Re: answering BioPerl questions, the BP list bioperl-l@lists.open-bio.org is a great place to see good examples by BP gurus. Very generally, we

1) prod politely for code/data if necessary;

2) give short answers to FAQs using links to an appropriate HOWTO or Scrapbook example;

3) give longer answers if the questions are deep, usually with code examples;

4) start long developer discussions if the questions are interesting;

5) admit guilt if the problem is actually a bug, then fix it;

6) generally assume the supplicant is completely ignorant, but infinitely intelligent.

I highly encourage monks to check out the wiki for easily distributed packets of sageliness.