On 4/22/2011 3:17 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
I recall that the traffic on the list was very overwhelming and that someone
commented to me that whenever he set to compose a message answering a
beginner, he already got several good replies by the time he finished. The
traffic now may also be a bit too much, even for experienced people, but I
recall it being much higher.
That is common to all online forums and nothing to be concerned with.
These forums were setup to help answer questions - many questioners
today will Google and find answers, often from archives of mailing lists
like this.
In the last decade I have gotten answers to problems from postings as
old as 8 years prior.
http://unarmed.shlomifish.org/909.html
It discusses Dealing with Provocative Internet people - based on the approach
in the book "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy".
Actually what is more useful about that link isn't your post, it is all
the blog posts appended to your post.
I don't frankly believe that engaging people in the manner you describe
works very well. I think pretty much everyone has been taught by their
mothers at a young age the difference between asking for something in
a rude SOB manner and asking nicely. So the "aggressive posting" or
"trolling" or whatever you want to call it usually originates from
people who know better. Like porno, we know it when we see it.
I suspect the reason things are not so polite on this list anymore
has much more to do with the changing nature of lists than anything
else. As I said, most people nowadays try googling up their answers
first, and only post to a forum as a last resort. So the posts your
going to see on these lists really are asking questions that cover
very "cutting edge" territory of Perl, where there is going to be more
disagreement. Such as, for example, the question of when do you
abandon old code and stop fixing bugs in it and replace it with
new code written in a modern style? There is no right answer for
this, at least not one that most people would agree on. Thus the
beginner who posts this is really asking an opinion question. That
is guaranteed to get a lot of opposing responses.
It is really better for most people to simply NOT respond to what they
think is trolling. Let the list members who DON'T think the post is
trolling, respond, and stay out of the thread. I think that is the best
advice for all online forums.
Ted
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