Re: How to know whether question in SOPW is entirely answered or not?

[tjh]

Unfortunately, even questions like yours here are often unanswerable to your 100% standard. Take heart, I think it's an interesting Monday night question, regardless of some of the tone in my comments below.

It's a mushy issue composed of mushy parts (which Larry understands very well in designing Perl itself):

• Beatnik's right. We're geeks and we often work schedules and hours others cringe at. Answers come when they come.

• Also, we're _human_ geeks. We make mistakes. We misread questions, misinterpret the poster's importances, sometimes we spin off into subthreads only barely related to the question. Sometimes we also answer, instead, the question we think the poster should have asked to start with.

• And, we're all volunteers, so it's probably a miracle that so many volunteer human geeks care enough to answer at all - but somehow, PM has become a terrific culture of helping.

  And since we're volunteers, it's probably unlikely that PM could "legislate" (read "enforce by coding changes") answerer behavior.

• And yet, I wouldn't mind seeing a system maybe allowing the original poster to toggle something (after so many days or so) that causes his 'unanswered' node to refresh to Newest Nodes, with an automatic expiration that Newest Nodes enforces anyway. Maybe the refreshing toggle would have to be Considered by senior monks. Or maybe the solution of the poster simply re-posting a new node accomplishes the same thing.

• There is unfortunate redundancy when questions come up repeatedly, regardless of the reason. However, I've been re-educated several times when someone's new post of an old question drew different answers that were more relevent, or addressed a new CPAN module, or somesuch, so I'm not near as sensitive on this issue as others may be.

• As to a SOPW question being 100% answered? Who's to judge? I know that many of us don't know whether we've asked the right question, so, would we recognize that it was 100%? I dunno, this point seems very mushy to me.

I'm confident that I've not 100% addressed, much less 100% answered 100% of your questions/comments in your post and this is likely to either annoy you, or simply serve as an example of the issue you've brought up.

I've not even touched the implementation suggestions (others will or have). In my case, since I'll concede I didn't answer you 100%, the question of whether to do anything is a senior issue to how to do it.

Do ut des