Original post by atsruserWell, that's too broad a statement to be true. Sometimes a hint takes a couple of minutes, sometimes I have to solve the problem in order to find a nice hint that points someone in the right direction. And to latex it up nicely can be time consuming. And writing up explanatory background information can take a long time, and need a lot of thought to assemble.
I'm broadly in agreement but with caveats:
The fundamental problem is ensuring that people post comprehensible questions. To my mind, this means either:
a) writing up clear latex or
b) posting a photo/upload of clear readable working, at the right resolution
I prefer latex, since even with a good picture, sometimes it's hard to read someone's writing style, but that's a relatively minor thing.
Too often people do neither, and we end up with a half-arsed attempt at formatted mathematics (e.g. x^2+2x+1/3x-1 or int[0^1] e^(-x)sin(x)dx) that is almost-latex, but either totally unreadable without lots of effort, or ambiguous. Given that many people try to write formatted mathematics, it's certainly not unreasonable to push them to go the whole hog and stick tex tags around it. It would be nice to have a dedicated tex button in the editor to do this.
In addition, whereas say 5 years ago, latex was a rare and seldom seen beast, these days, we are in the world of MathJax - it's easy to for sites to support it, and hence it will become more common, and more expected. It's in the interests of people learning maths to learn latex at the same time, so we ought to encourage it, if not require it.
Another advantage of requiring someone to either provide latex or good attachments is that is forces them to think about the layout and presentation of their work. Far too often, I see bizarre, barely comprehensible stream-of-conciousness descriptions of working ("..and then I multiplied by x^2, which made the whole thing = <blah>, and then I divided by 2, which seemed to give the right result..." ) rather than the actual working itself - I don't want a story, I want your working.
And to echo DFranklin's complaint: I have poor vision specifically at screen distance (unusually, I have good very-near vision, and good far vision, but am near sighted at 0.5.-1m) - even with glasses, I sometimes struggle to read attachments, and the poorly formatted semi-latex monstrosities, so typically I simply ignore them. It's not unreasonable to expect people who are requesting help to put in some effort to ensure that other people can, in fact, help them.