Re: Patience is a Monk Virtue

[BrowserUk]

If on an electrical forum, someone advised OPs to test for mains connection by sticking their fingers in the socket; they'd rightly have their posts removed.

Bad programming advice and suggestions may not be life threatening; but they are a waste of a newbies time, potentially career threatening, and poisonous to Perl's reputation if followed.

The war against one Monk's perceived incompetence seemed childish when it amounted merely to downvotes and snide comments. Now we're moving solidly into cyberbullying and censorship.

There is nothing "perceived" about his incompetence; and no "war" from my perspective. It's not his name I consider, but his content. If he doles out bad advice on cgi or html, that's for others to consider; but when it's on a subject I know a little about and he obviously knows nothing, I take it as my responsibility to protect newbies from his blathering.

As for patience. I first started questioning his content in 2008; by 2010, I'd started politely asking him to "Show me the code" and expending considerable efforts demonstrating how out-of-date(about 30 years) his suggestions were; and some mild mocking to try and get the point across.

See here for more of the history.

I think moving to using consideration, only after 9 years of questioning, exhaustively demonstrating, gentle mocking, outright & forthright telling him to stop wasting other people's time with his terrible -- sometimes bordering on criminal -- "help", has demonstrated more than enough "monk-ly patience".