A bit of a dilemma

I'm on the staff of a message board where people come for support for a web-based portal. The portal allows users to create a whole website around a forum. There's a lot of packaged code that comes with the portal, but the real reason that it shines is that it allows users to write their own code to do all sorts of interesting things. My specialty on the support board is to help people with custom code and I often write whole applications for people. (I've got one currently that I started a long time ago which I need to get finished. I don't like it, though, so I keep putting it off.)

I get annoyed with people who don't ever come back and tell me whether the code I wrote for them did what they needed it to do or not. About a fourth of the people fall into that category. Half or a bit more of the folks I write for are really nice and both tell me that it worked and give me a nice thank you. And then there's the ones who get effusive with their thanks and their compliments on my coding skills. I get a little uncomfortable with those. They tend to overestimate my ability -- I'm not really that good at it, just better than they are -- and it starts getting almost creepy. I tend to think of the original movie Bedazzled, where Dudley Moore says to Peter Cook "You're wonderful! You're marvelous!"

I went to the message board today and found a new topic which had been started by another staff member. It was a poll, with the title of "Do you think JPDeni is the Major Mighty $foo?" ("Major Mighty $foo" has become synonymous with something like "da bomb".) The only options are some form of "Yes", along with "Who is JPDeni" and "What?"

I really hate this. It makes me mega-uncomfortable and all I want to do is go away from the site and never come back. At the very least, I want to delete the topic (which I can do because I'm on the staff) and tell them that I don't like it. But I also don't want to embarrass any one or make them feel bad, either the person who started the topic or the ones who have responded. I know the intention is to be complimentary and nice, but I just hate it.

It's not that I can't take compliments. I can. It's just that at some point it becomes too much. Also, when they do something like that, I feel like I'm obligated to do more. I've come to the point recently where I decided to back off a bit on the custom code. I don't have time any more to do anything for myself and so many things that people ask for are things that I really don't enjoy coding. With this, they've set a level that I'm supposed to live up to and, if I don't -- if I'm just a regular person -- then I'll have let people down. It's rather like the old notion of a man putting a woman "on a pedestal." It's kinda nice at first, but then she realizes that one step outside of a narrowly confined area will cause a very nasty fall.

I don't suppose I'll do anything. I'll just hope it blows over. I hope it's soon.