Re: Monastery Gates Suggestion for Improvement

[johndageek]

This activity, however personally annoying, is also one of the reasons PerlMonks has been so successful. It has not become cold and elitist (RTFM and so on).

As a newbie, you receive some personal suggestions from someone(s) with more experience on the proper ways of the Monastery and advice on what documents to read that will help avoid faux pas in the future. Then surprise surprise – there is usually also several helpful hints to help the OP with their problem. Sometimes this is in the form of code snippets, suggestions or even to the newbie's surprise requests for more information.

I can not think of a better way to encourage new Perl users to continue with Perl as a language, and PerlMonks as a valued resource.

I have been a newbie at everything I have tried at one time or another, and the ones I have become an oldbie at seem to be the ones where a helpful mentor has managed to guide me from my ignorant ways toward the path to enlightenment. As well as on occasion taking on the role of mentor.

You do have an excellent suggestion, that I wholeheartedly agree with – making a link easily available on the front page. Perhaps a NewPoster link with a small amount of information so as not to overwhelm a new person with all of the details, but enough to help them post a clear initial question.

[jettero]

cold and elitist (RTFM and so on)

I find that more than a third of the SoPWs have at least one response that links to the super search along with some quip like, "did you even try searching first!?!?!" (It's a pet peeve. My thinking: If you don't want to answer, don't worry, someone else will.)

UPDATE: kyle, I exaggerate 100% of the time.

[jvector]

Being fairly new here myself, I've observed the same not-so-gentle responses to some SoPWs (and, being of a fairly timorous nature, made sure to read every darn page I could find on the subject of posting before doing so). But I have also been impressed by the patient, tolerant and helpful replies that have been offered to even the most poorly framed questions. I think that's a testament to the quality of people there are in this place.

There are already the "please read this first" notes under the Add your question area of the SoPW page. I suspect the world is made up of those who read things first and those who don't, so I don't honestly expect that another admonition on the Monastery Gates page would make much difference to the actions of the latter group.

The fact that unformatted questions still get through despite having to go through a preview stage suggests to me that the authors are operating in a write-only mode anyway.

[kyle]

I went to the Seekers of Perl Wisdom page and clicked the the "next entries" link at the bottom. Then I went through the ten questions (with a total of 60 replies) and skimmed through the replies. Two replies had links to How (Not) To Ask A Question and similar, one of those had a quip ("your bug is on line 42", directed at a monk who had posted no code). I also saw one that was a polite pointer to an external link.

I also went to Super Search and had a look at my own references to Super Search itself. Most of them say either "Super Search is your friend" or "Super Search is super". That's after a useful link that I'd found with Super Search.

Anyway, I think your estimated ratio of quipped to unquipped questions is a bit high.

[syphilis]

It's a pet peeve

I've got one of them, too !! ... ie same pet, same peeve :-)

Cheers,
Rob

[sasdrtx]

My original post isn't meant as a complaint about newbies' or veteran monks' behavior. I'm just trying to see if we could refactor out some of the redundancy, and maybe help newcomers get acquainted with the monastery's culture and customs a little quicker.