However, when you disagree with someone, do you just tell them you differ and leave it at that?
It depends, but that doesn't have much to do with this discussion.
I at least generally don't downvote a note because I disagree with
someone. Typical downvote reasons (for me) are:
- It's a non-Perl question - many web questions are non-Perl
questions, even if a program written in Perl is involved.
- The question is too poorly phrased. It requires too much
guessing what the problem is. This includes too much bad grammar,
too many typos, and bad specification of the problem(s).
- The post is just wrong. (Probably the majority of my down
votes fall in this category). This sometimes causes me to
downvote every single post in a thread.
- People not reading what they are replying to careful enough,
and coming up with code that doesn't meet the requirements given.
- People asking FAQs or trivial things that could have been found
easily in the manual.
But most of the time, I don't bother voting. I often have at the end
of the day still the same amount of votes left I had at the beginning.
I also know the arguments why others don't downvote for the reasons I do.
You don't have to repeat them - but posts that fall in one or more
of the categories mentioned above decrease the value I get from perlmonks.
Hence, they are getting my downvotes. And I'm not advocating anyone else
should use the same voting guidelines.
Abigail