I don't think the problem is the lack of a newbie section. Newbies are already confused, and don't know if they should post in Q&A, Seekers, or even Perl News sometimes. Adding another section won't help at all. SOPW doesn't have a minimal "should at least have read the llama book" bar any more than it has a maximum level. It's intended to be a place for any question, no matter how advanced or simple. (Whether it is or not is open to debate; I believe the perl beginner's list was started because casey was not satisfied with the answers given on perlmonks to newbies, but I might be remembering incorrectly).

I think the same guidelines of post answering apply to any question, regardless of its level. You might point the person to RTFM or supersearch, but it's always nicer to add a personal note such as some example code or an explanation on how this manual relates to the problem.

Of course, that's not always going to happen. Some people believe that since you have to do something yourself to learn, you may as well start with reading when pointed to the appropriate documentation. Or someone might not have time to fill in a longer answer, but still want to leave a starting point. There are probably other reasons for terse answers.

If you don't like an answer, the best thing you can do is to encourage the kind of answers you do like. Upvote the people who go to extra effort to provide personal answers. Give detailed answers yourself, and take a break from questions when you feel yourself getting too burned out to give those kind of answers. There are lots of people eager to answer questions, and the advantage of low-level questions is that more people can answer them (not always correctly, but there was already a thread on that recently).

In my experience, a lot of people do put in work answering even very basic questions. A really vague post about how to make a program that does X (where X is a large task no newbie could accomplish, which isn't even suitable for Perl) tends to get answers from people who have tried very hard to determine what the person actually wants, often reading through horrible formatting to do so.

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