Ask HN: Open source development / support split

Hello all,

I'm the author of an open source Javascript library for adding dynamic controls to HTML tables ( http://datatables.net ). Of late DataTables has proven to be reasonably popular, which I'm absolutely delighted with - but with that comes a lot more support requests for integrating the library into pages and apps.

As a result of this, I now find that what time I can spend on the project is spent answering questions in the forum and not taking the core project forward. Even then I can't keep up with the number of posts in the forum! When that happens, inevitably, there come questions such as "is this forum alive" etc. I've even been accused of making the forum rubbish intentionally to "force" people to make a donation to get support (the reality is that very few people do make a support request using that method).

Please don't misunderstand, asking questions is great! It is how we all learn after all. I want to be able to help people do the integration that they want to do with DataTables - but at the same time I want to be able to improve the library going forward.

So what I wanted to ask was, how do other developers maintain their development to support ratio? Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get a balance?