New Posts / Laziness

[azatoth]

(2) If total newbie will post code snippet with blatant errors, will we try to destroy him personally? Not at all. If a member of our community makes stupid mistake, after all good posts which bring him to bishop level, does not he deserves the same patience, or even more than that?

Actually, sadly, this does happen quite frequently. Hence the need for a newbie area, a tailored newbie welcome email, or at least something, to help people get a feel for the place. I don't know how many newbie posts I've seen that are rapidly downvoted for poor english / grammar / spelling, formatting, using words people don't like (LOL etc). That pisses me off. We strive to be a community with a wholehearted, spirited approach toward Perl, but *many* lack the patience and foresight required to ease new members into the fold.

If anything needs to be changed, it's our approach to new posts. My 3 point plan :

1. THINK! Before you vote, how long has this guy/gal been a member? Are they brand new? If so, welcome them. Give them a newbie ++. Do it.

2. Don't Downvote. Msg them. Don't be lazy. Be proactive for the community.

3. Nurture. I stayed here b/c a senior monk took the time to show me the ropes. Again, be proactive.

Azatoth a.k.a Captain Whiplash

Make Your Die Messages Full of Wisdom!
Get YOUR PerlMonks Stagename here!
Want to speak like a Londoner?

[grinder]

I fully agree, especially point 1. I'm now familiar with (the names of) most of the people who hang out here on a regular basis. When I see what I find is a pretty dumb post from someone I don't recognise, it's easy enough to right-click on their name and bring up their homenode in a seperate window.

On a number of occasions this has stopped me trashing the node with a --, and instead giving a considered reply.

Number 2 is also a good idea. This also goes both ways. I publicly critised (--ed and noded) a node that served only to point out a spelling error. When questioned, the person felt that since he didn't know the bad speller, he felt he couldn't be so presumptious as to message him. Messages are fun! Even from complete strangers and/or newbies!

If everyone kept this in mind, there wouldn't even be a need for a newbie area. Remember what Casey West said.

--

g r i n d e r

[da]

These are wise suggestions, and I think they should be added to the FAQs-- maybe under a new section, 'Responsibilities for Perlmonks Elders' or something similar.

This discussion has brought up an interesting point, mass-monk psychology. It wasn't obvious to me that many people would downvote a node to find out its rep, but this appears to be a real phenomanon. Personally, I would like to see the following information added to the Voting Guidelines (or 'How should I spend my votes?') FAQ entry:

<nbsp>

Downvoting for the purpose of finding the node's reputation rating is strongly discouraged, because it is unfair to the poster and tends to penalize nodes that would otherwise have neutral reputations.

___
-DA
> perl -MPOSIX -le '$ENV{TZ}="EST";print ctime(1000000000)'
Sat Sep  8 20:46:40 2001