Out of the last 250 votes cast on your nodes, 85.6% have been positive. Out of the last 500 votes, 87.4% have been positive.

Another frequent poster (often controversial) has 87.6% positive of last 250 and 92% positive out of 500.

A third controversial poster has 85.6% positive of 250 and 87.2% positive of 500.

I don't see anyone systematically downvoting everything you post.

(I do think you get some downvotes because your posts are often very difficult to read. You write long sentences sprinkled with what seem like arbitrary font changes and punctuation.)

You do not "have a sworn enemy", at least not in me. There is nothing systematic about my voting on your posts. I vote on the content of your posts, not their author. If they are in a thread I am interested in, I read them.

• If I think they are useful, insightful or funny etc. I upvote them.
• If they do not move me one way or the other, I do not vote on them.
• If I consider that they are technically, grossly inaccurate or ill-informed; or if they appear to serve no purpose in respect of answering the OPs question; I downvote them.

Remember, I can only downvote any post once. You only need impress one other person sufficiently that they upvote you, and you are at net 0, with my expression of opinion totally negated.

Some stats: Of your 2155 posts, I have voted on just over 10% at 245. Of those 24 have been upvotes and 221, downvotes.

The most recent upvote was on the 7th May, the most recent downvote was on the 31st May.

I've generally made it my practice to reply to posts I downvote, in order to explain why I downvoted it, but I long since gave up with you. Doing so never seems to stop you from trotting out the same vague, condescending, soapbox wisdoms -- often barely, if at all, related to the question at hand -- even on subjects that it is perfectly obvious -- and repeatedly demonstrated -- that you do not have a clue.

Like a politician. you'll often court popularity, by talking up popular subjects -- eg. "It should of course go without saying that there are numerous complete frameworks within CPAN for implementing scenarios such as this one." without actually identifying which modules you are alluding to.

And you never post actual solutions. (Ie. code.).

Those posts I've downvoted have earned that downvote by dint of their content; not because of their authorship.

I'm confused on two points.

Six months ago, you posted essentially the same proposal to eliminate down-votes, receiving much useful feedback. So why post again, and without providing a link to your previous post? Did you forget you posted it?

You claim that, like Rhett Butler, you don't give a damn about being down-voted. If down-votes don't bother you, why go to the trouble, not once but twice, to write at length about the ill-feeling caused by down-voting?

sundialsvc4:

I strongly disagree. I enjoy the ability to encourage behaviour I like, and discourage behavior I don't. I consider the ++ and -- as 'tiny' modifiers, and replies as 'bigger' ones.

I'll drop a ++ whenever I see something I like, and want to see more of:

• Extremely interesting questions. (I don't upvote "normal" questions, as I consider the answers to be adequate reward.)
• Good replies.
• Feedback from the OP describing what worked and why.

Similarly, I'll drop a -- on any node with behavior I'd like to see less of:

• Flamewars: I'll frequently drop a -- on all participants, and try to stay the heck out of it.
• Misleading answers
• Explicit spoon feeding of homework

Other people have different opinions on the behaviors they want to reward and which they want to discourage. I don't consider my opinions to be any better than any others, as it's a communal effort. If the behavioral norm moves away from what I like, I'll leave.

When I notice downvotes on one of my nodes, I re-read it to see if I can understand why. That way, I can decide whether I want adjust the way I do things in order to "play well with others". For example, when I started participating, I used to write messages like:

sundialsvc4--

This is an example...

--roboticus

But then someone asked why I was downvoting/disapproving a node. I then switched over to using a colon after their name to avoid confusion.

Another example: I used to give out explicit answers to homework questions without thinking about it. Someone (here? elsewhere?) convinced me that it's usually not a good practice. So now I try to give appropriately-sized hints. If they showed good effort and presented their code, I might post a corrected version. If someone showed no effort but didn't ask for code, I'll point them at a couple modules or documents. For others I might give them a partial skeleton.

If you review my posting history, you'll see that my opinions change over time. I view the -- as a tool that helps everyone out. If we only had ++ or "shut up", I doubt that perlmonks would be as good as it is.

Ah, well, I've blathered on quite enough on the topic.

Update: s/upvode/upvote/

...roboticus

When your only tool is an upvote, it's hard to tell whether your node is bad or is simply boring.

1. It's been thoroughly discussed before (cf jdporter's note above).
2. Thumbs down (aka - -) is a relevant and appropriate response to false or garbage posts; a point contradicted in this proposal, IMO.
3. Similarly, this is not eBay; nobody's transactions here necessarily involve financial gain or loss and reputation is to some extent or another a consequence of worthwhile contributions -- which is to say, wise answers, appropriate tutelage or even thoughtful voting (<rant> which does NOT include the ++ votes that appear so often for truly ill-formed questions</rant>).
4. Just because I disagree with your proposal (and would oppose it, even were it presented without such easily disputed/rebutted "arguments in support")>.
5. Finally, I second Your Mother's point, and call the question.

BTW, there must be more than one villain of the type you posit in your introduction: I probably downvote you nodes slightly more often than I ++ them (but then, most of them I leave unmolested in either direction.)

just FYI, this has been proposed and discussed before. The ones I was able to find easily are We should elminate: Anonymous, and DOWN-voting and Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good, but I know there have been several others.

(Oh - you already know about the first of those two threads: you posted it!)

-- One of the reasons I don't participate at SO is that I cannot downvote comments. When I don't have a voice, critical or otherwise, I expect a paycheck in return.

You seem convinced that BrowserUk is your "sworn enemy", even going so far as to accuse him of using sock-puppet accounts to downvote your nodes. I believe you are wrong on both counts.

To be sure, BrowserUk calls you out severely when he believes you are wrong. Yet if you examine his posting history, you will notice that you have not been singled out in that regard. And I strongly doubt that he -- or any other highly ranked monk -- would stoop to using sock puppets, a serious crime in the virtual state that is Perl Monks.

For the record, here is a selection of BrowserUk's harsher quotes in response to your posts:

• Re^5: Interview Counterattack: "Show me a project-plan": "What utter rubbish."
• Re^2: Thread create hangs: "Twaddle!"
• Re^2: Date Difference using Date::Manip module: "Which makes this post, like 90% of those you make, pointless, platitudinous, fatuous froth. So desperate are you to say something, you'll say anything, no matter how irrelevant or wrong."
• Re^2: Whats quicker - passing along as variable to sub, or global var?: "Just more fatuous garbage."
• Re^2: remove part of string (DNA): "Nothing you have said above is even vaguely relevant to the OPs question. You get more fatuous by the day."
• Re^2: list of unique strings, also eliminating matching substrings: "Utter garbage!"
• Re^2: Perl sorting unique values: "When will you get it through your thick skull that sorting is not linear."
• Re^2: count the maximum no.of occurence: "No, you moron. Sorting is, at best, O(N log N)."
• Re^3: Advice for optimizing lookup speed in gigantic hashes: "Do you actually read the posts you reply to, or just divine their content through your lower lumbar regions? ... So will you please, please, please stop trotting out your "virtual memory is disk" missive at every inopportune moment. Read what you are responding to. (Follow your own advice: read it twice, and then once more). Think about it for a while. AND THEN SHUT THE F*** UP. Because it is getting boring trying to keep correcting you over and over and over."
• Re^4: Win32 limit to number of calls to system()?: "I've given up explaining to this guy, cos he never listens, never debates and never learns."
• Re^2: Tracing memory leak: "Care to explain by what magic of "old bullshitter" logic you arrived at the conclusion that the OP was constructing self-referential structures?"
• Re^3: Problem handling 2 simultaneous socket streams: "Thank you for explaining that to me. Except you're wrong! ... you aren't just slightly off, but absolutely diametrically wrong on all counts ... So why post? Why do you -- who evidently know little of the subject, and understand even less of the little you have some inkling of -- feel the need to demonstrate to me -- I think fair to say, one of the more knowledgeable monks with regard to threading -- just how useless your home-spun wisdom fairy stories on this subject, as with so many others, really are? ... What is the point of your posting this garbage?"
• Re^2: Compare 2 very large arrays of long strings as elements: "More utter bollocks! ... Once more you are sending OPs down blind alleys with your home-spun 'wisdoms'"
• Re^2: Fork Results in thousands of processes: "Why do you keep blurting out these pointless, useless, whole wrong replies to questions on subjects you obviously have no practical knowledge whatsoever?"
• Re^4: Fork Results in thousands of processes: "at least one other person recognises your crap for what it is"
• Re^7: "Automated" benchmarking: "This is another of these fatuous "wisdoms" you are so ready to trot out."
• Re^2: Need help with Perl multi threading: "Perhaps if you relied less on your apparently limited imagination and tried using the stuff you feel obliged to talk about, you might talk less crap."
• Re^4: panic: COND_DESTROY(6): "If wasting the time of random third parties by answering their serious, usually work-related, to them important, questions with rafts of totally misleading, made up garbage is what you find 'entertaining', you deserve my sympathy."
• Re^4: Locked threads and tcp timeouts: "Why do you keep spouting the same, groundless, unfounded, garbage? ... It is beginning to feel like Groundhog Day around here ... Doing (saying) the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, is either first sign of madness or senility."
• Re^5: how did blocking IO become such a problem?: "Sorry, but it is blindingly obvious that you have no idea what is meant by asynchronous IO ... I suggest you look it up -- you know, do a little research, ensure that you know what it is you're pontificating about -- before you torture any more incorrect analogies to death."
• Re^7: how did blocking IO become such a problem?: "... dress them together with ``lot's'' "of" 'different' quotes and _s^t_y^l_i^s_tⁱ_c devices and some flowery analogies to fool the unknowing into a few up-votes, but it stands out like a sore thumb that there is no real understanding behind your words. ... You Sir, are a wannabe. But you're either too old, or too lazy or too recalcitrant to actually to do any research -- much less actually write any programs -- and get a real understanding of that about which you pontificate. You're not even a has-been. More, a never-will-be."
• Re: Proposal: eliminate down-votes: "... never seems to stop you from trotting out the same vague, condescending, soapbox wisdoms -- often barely, if at all, related to the question at hand -- even on subjects that it is perfectly obvious -- and repeatedly demonstrated -- that you do not have a clue"
• Re^2: Block-structured language parsing using a Perl module?: "Do you never actually read the question? ... Please stop responding to my questions. Your responses are never useful to me and simply annoy me."
• Re^2: Block-structured language parsing using a Perl module?: "Literally nothing you said above relates in any way to the question I asked. I'm not interested in your extremely dubious "expertise". I'm not interested in your opinion. So please. Just stop."
• Re^3: Perl 5 Optimizing Compiler, Part 4: LLVM Backend?: "And I suspect that, once again, you haven't a clue what you are talking about." ... "In a nutshell, your "suspicions" are so out of touch with reality, and so founded upon little more than supposition, that they are valueless."
• Re^5: Perl 5 Optimizing Compiler, Part 4: LLVM Backend?: "When sundial "contributes" his 'stop energy' (skip directly to 33:24) there is no knowledge, no experience, nothing but the negative energy of his groundless suppositions."
• Re^2: Perl 5 Optimizing Compiler, Part 6: A Love Letter To Dave Mitchell, chromatic, and BrowserUK: "You who has polluted this place with endless reams of your recycled, homespun, out-of-the-ark, ribald tosh."
• Re^2: [OT] Side-by-side assemblies: The nitty-gritty.: "Sorry, but you obviously don't understand the technicalities of the example."
• Re^2: dynamic number of threads based on CPU utilization: "So do just stop regurgitating your useless, pointless, irrelevant, and gratuitously incorrect home-spun wisdoms."
• Re^4: dynamic number of threads based on CPU utilization: "Look you idiot. You are talking crap. SO DO SHUT THE F*** UP!"
• Re: IO::Select and correct way to detect client crashed?: "More of your patented, utter ribald tosh..."
• Re^3: selecting columns from a tab-separated-values file: "I'm not sure that standing on one leg whilst drinking blood from a freshly decapitated chicken would help; so I don't mention it ... your instincts prejudiced guessing is wrong! ... it will show your 'advice' to be nothing more than groundless guessing"
• Re^2: WMI query with Threads: "That statement is garbage ... Why do you insist of posting on subjects that you obviously have no useful knowledge of? Could it be that you know that even your garbage replies will often garner you a few upvotes?"
• Re^4: WMI query with Threads: "You make statements -- that you must just pluck out of your own imagination -- that simply don't make sense ... You are helping no one with answers that are this far off base."
• Re^2: ?Thread safe DBI? any updates?: "on the strength of the utter guff you repeatedly spew into any and every thread on threading; I seriously doubt that you have ever written a threaded program in your life. To date, you have yet to post a single code solution, on any subject, anywhere on this forum. You are a fantasist. Nothing more nor less."
• Re^4: Synchronising threads with signals (or not): "What garbage you speak ... You are just making it up as you go along. As per normal. Pathetic!"
• Re^2: Pause and Resume Exe: "Yet more crap!"
• Re^2: Threads and signals in Windows: "Pure, unadulterated garbage."
• Re^4: Threads and signals in Windows (invoking the name): "Even the answer you gave -- which was to a completely different question -- was wrong in at least four ways! ... You are helping no one by responding with such utter garbage in threads on subjects it is patently and painfully obvious you haven't got the first clue what you are talking about."
• Re^5: Threads and signals in Windows (invoking the name): "After all my carefully constructed, reasoned arguments about the technical merits of your posts; all you are worried about is the downvotes. And a liar to boot."
• Re^2: Does the main thread yield?: "You utter buffoon."
• Re^2: Does the main thread yield?: "You get no respect from me because you do not deserve any whilst you continue to post garbage like this."
• Re^3: PERL issues a "lock can only be used on shared values" when locking a shared hash: "Your lack of understanding -- not just of threading, but Perl, and even programming, in general -- makes it all more frustrating and annoying that you once again have started to dole out "advice" on subjects you simply know nothing useful about."
• Re^3: Optimise file line by line parsing, substitute SPLIT: "Prove it by posting the code. You won't (because you can't). Talk is cheap (and in your case invariably wrong!)."
• Re^2: Compact data classes: "Show me that this isn't just another case of a keyword triggering one of your 6 remaining synapses to fire, and cause you to trot out the associated, autonomic "advice"."
• Re^4: Compact data classes: "...stop regurgitating pointless boilerplate, in response to questions to which it barely relates, if at all ... As for "fellow Monks": a) Drop the 's'; b) you're no fellow of mine"
• Re^4: Multithreading leading to Out of Memory error: "Wasn't me. I'm not the only one who's seen through your bs."
• Re^3: (Toward a better PerlMonks) Who do we serve, and why, and how can we do it better?: "It is the "information content" of your posts that is demonstrably -- and oft-demonstrated -- as wrong -- often 180° so -- that is the source of your downvotes and personal attacks."
• Re^4: How to deal with the fact that Perl is not releasing memory: "This is how lexical (my) variables work. The fact that you don't know this beggar's belief. The fact that you don't know this but still feel qualified to offer others advice beggar's disbelief!"
• Re^2: Signal Capturing....: "You'll be familiar with the abbreviation GIGO; with you its more GOGOGOGOGOGO...."
• Re^2: A better way to make the script run faster?: "Utter baloney!"
• Re^2: how to improve the performance of a perl program: "You sir; are a total moron!"
• Re^3: Negative voting: "Bullshit!"
• Re^2: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!: "You really do not think things through do you."
• Re^4: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!: "You once again demonstrate that you have either have a very short memory; or a very selective one ... Probably your worst idea to date."
• Re^2: Data structures in Perl. A C programmer's perspective.: "Your whole post is total misinformation."
• Re^2: How can I force thread switching?: "This guy cannot even read code. It should be possible to take out injunctions against morons like him."
• Re^2: How would you parse this?: "I don't need to provide you with anything. It would be pointless to do so. You've never provided a solution to anything here."
• Re^2: multi threading DBI: "...totally irrelevant drivel in the context of the question asked"
• Re^2: Comparing two arrays: "Total garbage."
• Re^4: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter: "... exceptionally rude to certain people. And then *only* when civil discourse and reasoned persuasion have failed to modify frustrating behaviour that borders upon the malicious."
• Re^2: Using 64 Bit Perl for Production Scripts.: "... I distrust everything you say. Because every time I have verified anything you've said; it has not just been slightly wrong, but rather, substantially wrong ... Whatever combination of malignancies drives your continuing need to post always perpetually pointless, usually useless, habitually harmful, and sometimes serious malevolent advice; it does this place harm ... most regulars here have seen you for the ignoble, thick-skinned, self-deluding conman that you are ... the particular brand of meaningless, techno-babble flimflam that is the hallmark of your long con ... Go away and do not come back!"
• Re^2: how to access elements in perl: "The fact that after 7 years of being around this place you still find yourself "gazing in wonderment" at such a simple piece of code just typifies your attitude. You learnt a bit of programming about 25 years ago -- what was it? COBOL? Fortan77? -- and you've never bothered to learn anything new since."
• Re^3: At the risk of saying something stupid-but-obvious about Roman Numerals: "At last, something at which you excel. You excel at "saying something stupid"."
• Re^3: Proper undefine queue with multithreads: "Ignore/downvote both existing and any further replies you get from sundialsvc4. He has no working knowledge of using Perl's threading and has a history of posting long, rambling, always useless, often dangerous "suggestions" ... he continues to waste everyone time by posting these useless, over generic replies on subjects that he has been proven, time & time again, to have no first hand knowledge ... Why? I think the poor ol' thing is getting so senile that he genuinely forgets that he's only regurgitating things he's read rather than his own experiences. Sadly, whilst he seems to be able to retrieve odd snippets of generally good advice; he always seems to forget the correct context, rendering them useless"
• Re^4: Proper undefine queue with multithreads: "Which makes the post nothing but meaningless guff!"
• Re^2: Check randomly generated numbers have not been used before: "If you had any programming skills, you'd make some attempt to verify a wild-assed guess like that ... Best you stick to your fluff pieces, handing out bad advice that could ruin young guys careers; at least then you cannot be proven wrong!"
• Re^2: The problem with "The Problem with Threads": "Almost every sentence in that diatribe is wrong. I can't be bothered to explain why any more cos you'll only regurgitate it back to me in the wrong context a week or two from now when you've forgotten where you read it and what it meant."
• Re^4: The problem with "The Problem with Threads": "That sums up your "knowledge"! Outdated, misunderstood, regurgitated, parrot learnt garbage."
• Re^4: The future of Perl?: "As for your 'point' in this post, it really is garbage"
• Re^2: Getting/handling big files w/ perl: "Now to debunk Yet Another of your Inglorious Theories."
• Re^2: Trying to Understand the Discouragement of Threads: "You have proved time and time again that you don't understand threading; indeed, everything you've ever posted on the subject -- which has never included a single line of code -- has been proven wrong."
• Re^4: Trying to Understand the Discouragement of Threads: "a total waste of space, and dangerous waste of mindspace your utterings are; that just about everything you post is little more than the first vaguely related garbage that springs into your indiscriminate mind"
• Re^2: Is 100% CPU utilisation during a procees is aproblem?: "Have you ever considered actually testing one of your theories before posting?"
• Re^4: Global variable unexpectedly modified when passed by reference: "I'm no longer the only one who has seen you for what you are. Almost the diametric opposite of what you think you are and claim to be."
• Re^2: Why Moose uses this syntax??!!: "Twat. You really have never bothered to learn Perl at all have you."
• Re^3: Bidirectional lookup algorithm? (Updated: further info.): "you're either too lazy to read them properly; or too dumb to understand them"
• Re^5: Bidirectional lookup algorithm? (Updated: further info.): "Any programmer would know that A|B is not equivalent to A & B. That you do not understand also comes as no surprise at all."
• Re: RAM: It isn't free . . . (No, but its damn cheap!): "You really are incapable of taking a hint! I've ignored your posts on this subject because they are irrelevant to my problem! ... no amount of you banging on about ancient history, extant wisdoms nor inapplicable generic truths changes the fact that I know my problem space and its requirements; and you know nothing"
• Re: RAM: It isn't free . . . (No, but its damn cheap!): "And that really explains the Sundial in your user handle and company name: Sundial; as-in antiquated technology that was grossly inaccurate, and only came close to being correct about twice a year"
• Re^2: RAM: It isn't free . . .(Mike Robinson:criminally inept.): "that is a far better trade-off than your criminally inept suggestion ... the net cost of your suggestion would be $1.4 billion ... all because you've eschewed learning anything new for the last 30 years; seemingly preferring to remain more an archaeologist, than a programmer. I just hope that people will learn from this and finally realise that your malodorously constructed, maliciously provocative, willfully ignorant, hopelessly outdated -- not just non-useful, but perilously inept -- completely worthless, merit-less fluff; is intended to be neither technically useful nor intellectually stimulating; its only purpose being shameful self-promotion of the vilest, any-hits-are-good-hits, form."
• Re^3: RAM: It isn't free . . . (Mike Robinson:Grabbing at straws!): "You puerile fool; grabbing at straws. I've never been an academic."
• Re^7: What 'should' a professional PERL programmer know?: "...until you post some perl code that: a) compiles (clean); b) runs; c) solves an OPs non-trivial problem. Something that, in 7 years & 3500 posts, you have yet to do, despite that you present yourself as some kind of programming guru"
• Re^2: Multithreading How do I share hash of hash of arrays: "Utter garbage!"
• Re^2: The Boy Scout Rule: "Downvoted! ... your inane, facile, puerile, snide, underhand and utterly deliberate practice of posting a reply to a particular node; as a response to {some other} randomly chosen node ... Why are you such a deliberate, willful moron?"
• Re^2: Using threads to process multiple files: "Downvoted: Because the OP stated that his non-threaded version works fine; and he's trying to use threading to speed it up"
• Re^2: Algorithm for "Incrementing" strings: "Go on then, do it. Show us. Any language you like. Show us."
• Re^2: Design thoughts: iterator invalidation: "You sad ^&^%&*&*%^ ... I seriously doubt if you have ever written a single, complete, working program in Perl ... sticking your confused and muddled oar in all the time ... The rest is just regurgitated-out-of-context, meaningless garbage. Please stop posting. (In my threads at the very least!)"
• Re^4: Design thoughts: iterator invalidation: "Twat! Now ... forc offee!"
• Re^8: PM Leveling Guide. (perception): "I'll return every downvote I ever took from him, from my own tally, on one condition: he posts a single, complete, non-trivial, working Perl(*) program that he has written"
• Re^6: write hash to disk after memory limit: "B***shit!"
• Re^4: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "The rest is regurgitated garbage. Probably cribbed from the 'net and then sundial'd into an unreadable mess. Please stop!"
• Re^6: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "I did not "knee-jerk". I read it and despaired for your sanity. ... Now please STFU."
• Re^10: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "You total, utter, complete and unbashed, ^%$$%$^ TWONK! Please stop talking bollocks, and STFU."
• Re^2: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "if by "Moore" you mean Boyer Moore; you're wrong again"
• Re^2: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "you show me yours and I'll show you mine!"
• Re^2: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "You haven't handed anyone here anything. Except, dubious council & mal-advice, technical buffoonery, the rare scrap of broken code, and eye-ache ... Your continued need to stick your oar in where its not wanted ... your attempts at technical contributions here are nothing more than a vacuous pretense of some kind of technical knowledge ... You neither disseminate learning; nor acquire any. Your 'contributions' here are all, entirely negative. And your persistence in vomiting them in our direction is far more offensive and "rude" than any "bad words" I might have used ... And your, entirely puerile, attempts to offend me by mentioning the British Royals is hilarious"
• Re^2: Why Boyer-Moore, Horspool, alpha-skip et.al don't work for bit strings. (And is there an alternative that does?): "your words show a complete misunderstanding of the problem; and offer completely meaningless description of completely unworkable approaches to a completely different problem ... Someone recently described you as "The PerlMonks Village Idiot"; but that's just unfair to village idiots, cos they can't help it."
• Re^3: ithreads memory leak: "Ignore anything and everything sundialsvc4 says. He has a proven track record of meaningless, misdirected & pure malicious posts on subjects he has provably no knowledge or understanding of. And in particular, threads ... I just wanted to warn you to ignore sundialsvc4 who has never posted a single line of working code here. Be warned!"
• Re^2: Naming ordinals (directions/sides/faces) in the presence of 3D rotation?: "why comment on stuff you don't understand?"
• Re^2: Can I/O operations on the same IO::Socket be executed in different threads?: "Don't you ever tire of making a fool of yourself? More of your trade mark utter garbage!"
• Re^2: Heap structure for lookup?: "More garbage. Are you really so bored that playing the village idiot is your best gig?"
• Re^2: Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts.: "He knows just enough to make his posts read as plausible if you are new to programming; which makes them not just technical nonsense and annoying, but have the potential to really waste the time of unwary newbies and drive-by viewers."
• Re^4: Can you style XMLwith CSS to display tag attributes?: "Why do you persist in telling me what I know not to be true?"
• Re^2: How to split file for threading?: "The only question left is why do you bother to continue to play the Village Idiot™"
• Re^2: How to use threads to write worksheets of excel: "No surprise here, just more total bollocks!"
• Re^3: Perl seg fault while joining threads: "It is pure speculation by a totally discredited monk who as far as we can tell has never written a single line of working Perl code, much less anything that uses threads. He picks up terms like blotting paper and regurgitates them in interesting combinations much like the waffle generator. Except, he's old school; and does it all manually with his own artistic flair."
• Re^2: Just curious: is there a BOT that downvotes "me?": "Its real easy when you spout nonsense on a subject that one of us does know what we're talking about. If you'd put half as much effort into learning something -- Perl, or any related field -- as you have into trying to convince us that we are all wrong about you; by now you'd actually be able to answer some questions."
• Re^2: Optimized remote ping: "Why ask me to test your theories? (Especially when you aren't even polite enough to ask in reply to me!)"
• Re^3: FastCGI / Apache memory usage?: "That is wrong! ... And you have the gall to "cordially suggest" to flexvault. More, pointless, meaningless, malignant and destructive garbage delivered so "politely" that it persuades other know-nothings that you're being oppressed."
• Re^8: Beyond Agile: Subsidiarity as a Team and Software Design Principle: "This is, by far, the stupidest thing -- amongst a very long list of very stupid things -- that you've said here."
• Re^2: Creating Variables Just to Pass into Subroutine?: "Downvoted. De-faved. --; I couldn't agree less. Huh Huuurn!"
• Re^5: Disadvantage of not supporting pthreads in perl and how perl overcomes? (cores): "Bullshit!"
• Re^2: Disadvantage of not supporting pthreads in perl and how perl overcomes?: "All you've done, and continue to do, is waste people's time and energies."
• Re^3: Background Run: "...which makes your comment, like all your comments; utterly meaningless"
• Re^2: Perl threads - parallel run not working: "Twat!"
• Re^8: Patience is a Monk Virtue: "Whilst he never seems to tire of trotting out the same'ol thoroughly and repeatedly discredited garbage, the rest of us tire of repeatedly disabusing it. If even marto, one of the most even-tempered, even-handed and tolerant of those here, occasionally shows his frustration at the patience-sapping, energy-sucking, limit-testing stream of sewage that flows from the sundial"
• Re^2: Alternatives for index() ... substr() ?: "Liar! Whether the result of dishonesty, fantasy, or delusion. That statement is a bare-face, in-our-faces, total untruth. The rest of your garbage is just meaningless."
• Re^2: OT: Converting some js to Perl: "You're like a mosquito in the dark; an unswatable irritation."
• Re^2: Is it still worth learning Perl as a first language?: "You are a generalist in the sense that, you know nothing about anything, rather than are weak on something in particular. You are -- at the risk of repeating myself from a loong time ago -- a charlatan; a fake; a fakir(as in mendicant; for attention); a wastrel; a fraud; a con; an impostor; a shyster; a phony; a quack; a pretender; a cozener; in short, the epitomous snake-oil salesman."
• Re^2: Algorithm inspiration required.: "I consider you to be a delusional, possibly senile, imbecile"
• Re^2: Algorithm inspiration required.: "... this willful, deliberate, malevolent destruction of other people's threads with your pointless, useless, vacuous ramblings ... your continued attempts to 'befriend' me by offering me your 'wisdom' on my SoPWs; you have nothing to say, technical nor otherwise that I am ever going to read."

And here is a selection of your gentler quotes in response to BrowserUk's posts:

• Re^2: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign: "It is easy to know from hearing you "speak" that you have been around this block many times: yours is the voice of well-seasoned experience."
• Re: Psychic Disconnect and Object Systems: "what BrowserUK said here is, in my opinion, excellent wisdom, well thought-out and presented"
• Re^2: map2 {} grep2 {} ...: "An excellent suggestion. Fav'd."
• Re^2: Problem handling 2 simultaneous socket streams: "Good advice. (Fav'd.)"
• Re^2: Annoying 'Use of uninitialized value in concatenation' warning: "as BrowserUK wisely suggests"
• Re: Perl/Tk code structure: "Agreeing fully with BrowserUK's previous comments on this (I think...)"
• Re^6: "Automated" benchmarking: "++. Very true."
• Re: What's Wrong with program: "such ideas having already been given to you, and in great detail by experts such as BrowserUK"
• Re^4: Faster push and shift: "Quite obviously, BrowserUK very routinely processes gigantic datasets during the course of his work day. He is quite the expert on those (what are to many of us...) edge cases. Upvoted."
• Re^4: how did blocking IO become such a problem?: "(up-voted) ... whereas, if I may presume to impose upon your very apt analogy..."
• Re^2: About self-invoked threads into class: "Such a thorough and well-reasoned explanation certainly should convince anyone. Upvoted."
• Re: Temp variable performace vs Inline behavior: "Apart from the performance/capacity "edge cases" that I openly acknowledge BrowserUK (in particular) deals with every day"
• Re: Concurrent Cache Pattern: "I say this in all seriousness, BrowserUK could whip one up in about three minutes"
• Re: how apply large memory with perl?: "BrowserUK's algorithm is of course more efficient, and he has the RAM."
• Re^3: Perl 5 Optimizing Compiler: "BrowserUK, I specifically acknowledge that your work is an exception to that statement, and very impressive work it certainly is."
• Re: Block-structured language parsing using a Perl module?: "You have "long skills" in certain pursuits, which I have quickly learned to respect and not to question"
• Re^3: var comparison: "with the notable exception of the very valid edge-cases that my esteemed colleague, BrowserUK, routinely and legitimately encounters in his daily work"
• Re: module w/ object-oriented and functional interfaces: best practices?: "Echoing BrowserUK’s comments, and after up-voting his post, ..."
• Re: Parallel processing with ForkManager: "BrowserUK’s subsequent recommendation to use temporary tables and a join-query, below, is in my view unquestionably the best approach"
• Re^3: dynamic number of threads based on CPU utilization: "As you say in the (upvoted) earlier comment, this is a poorly thought-out program from the start."
• Re^5: dynamic number of threads based on CPU utilization: "I will trouble you henceforth to remember that very simple rule of human etiquette."
• Re: Comparing sets of phrases stored in a database?: "As a slight parenthetical comment to BrowserUK’s excellent (and heavily up-voted) advice..."
• Re^3: Does IO::Select work? (Problem partially resolved): "If BrowserUK said it, yes, he is sure. And sure to be right. Seriously."
• Re: BrowserUk Missing but not Forgotten: "Hello? Esteemed Monk, are you, like, okay?? I’m being utterly serious, and daresay not alone. Check in, please..."
• Re^2: "Out of memory" problem: "Agree with BrowserUK ..."
• Re: Syntax explanation required: "(And in making that comment, I consciously and respectfully intend to steer the middle-ground against acknowledged valid ... BrowserUK ... edge-case exceptions ...)"
• Re: Evolving a faster filter?: "I am certain that this thread will attract the attention of BrowserUK, who is well-known about these parts to be especially expert in high-performance algorithms in high-volume situations. I especially look forward to his insights on this subject."
• Re^3: Installing Template::Toolkit on Windows: "sorry, “troll-UK,” but I do have “experience” here"
• Re: Threads and signals in Windows: "Excellent comments, BrowserUK. Very informative."
• Re^4: Threads and signals in Windows (invoking the name): "My response to you has been to commend your responses and to up-vote a great many of them. I have never down-voted a single one"
• Re: How to check if a variable's value is equal to a member of a list of values: "the high-performance applications frequently written by BrowserUK"
• Re: Issue with hash definition & possibly some other stuff: "Echoing BrowserUK..."
• Re: RFC: Simulating Ruby's "yield" and "blocks" in Perl: "As BrowserUK says (in so many words), I would not disabuse the Perl-5 language..."
• Re: Does the main thread yield?: "as BrowserUK's elegant code example does by blocking the sender while the queue is too-large. (I really do think that you should put this little jewel into CPAN anyway, even if it uses an undocumented feature.)"
• Re^2: Optimise file line by line parsing, substitute SPLIT: "And, meaning to take absolutely no thunder away from this most-excellent example ... It’s exactly the concept that BrowserUK demonstrates here ... Great post. Thanks."
• Re^3: Multithreading leading to Out of Memory error: "BrowserUK, didn’t you “forget” to log in?"
• Re: Efficiency: Recursive functions while de-subbing my program: "BrowserUK’s original observation is what holds water in this case"
• Re^5: Optimization Help: "BrowserUK has a well-earned reputation for doing things like that"
• Re^3: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!: "Popes such as yourself could nary-well be gods. Perhaps even with the power to permanently excommunicate pesky fellow Monks with whom Your Eminences simply do not see eye-to-eye? (It occurs to me that this thought might have for you a certain appeal ...)"
• Re: Problem with Threaded Socket Server: "Adding one more thought (in case I missed it) to BrowserUK’s excellent recommendations here ... (++)x2"
• Re^4: Fastest way to download many web pages in one go?: "An excellent and well-reasoned analysis ...   “++”"
• Re: Fork vs pThreads: "What BrowserUK is saying about “only 4 at a time” is anything but “an aside.” It’s the key to the whole thing."
• Re^3: How to optimize CPU and Memory usage?: "You, BrowserUK, are constantly squeezing every ounce of capacity and performance out of a program ... because you quite legitimately need to, and you are obviously quite good at it."
• Re: Comparing two arrays (responding to the wrong post): "It is, at best, very rude to say “total garbage” in response to a post ... it doesn’t make you look like a genius, merely a boor."
• Re: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter: "I do recall BrowserUK in particular saying that many hours are spent each day eliminating the pure-junk robo postings ... (But we hugely appreciate your ongoing efforts!)"
• Re^3: Using 64 Bit Perl for Production Scripts.: "In a word: shut up."
• Re: how to access elements in perl: "Of course, bioinformatics is a very specific vertical within which the implied details of such a request might be “fully understood.” I would not know – it is not my vertical. It does seem to be yours, BrowserUK."
• Re^3: Proper undefine queue with multithreads: "I simply suggest that you should follow BrowserUK’s sage advice exactly as given ... take BrowserUK’s excellent recommendations, and go"
• Re^2: Proper undefine queue with multithreads: "An excellent description – upvoted"
• Re^3: Security: Dancer Session cookie swap: "Good morning, BrowserUK, did you forget to log-in again?"
• Re^3: Security: Dancer Session cookie swap: "BrowserUK, there’s a marvelous little box at the upper right-hand corner of the screen called, “Log In.”"
• Re: The problem with "The Problem with Threads": "Good thoughts. Very."
• Re^3: The problem with "The Problem with Threads": "My points are valid, and they don’t dispute your interesting and thorough essay, which by the way I upvoted."
• Re^3: The future of Perl?: "Now that’s a most peculiar “paraphrase,” good sir! And you yourself know it to be a lot of bilge, so there. (You’ve got plenty of industry experience.)"
• Re^3: Trying to Understand the Discouragement of Threads: "I happen to strongly agree with the positive compliment that you were very rightly paid in the OP"
• Re: Is 100% CPU utilisation during a procees is aproblem?: "In addition to what BrowserUK correctly suggests..."
• Re^3: Global variable unexpectedly modified when passed by reference: "BrowserUK, the very least that you can do, before spewing-off like that, is to have the professional courtesy to do so under your own name"
• Re^4: Bidirectional lookup algorithm? (Updated: further info.): "Thank you for calling me “lazy” and “dumb!” ... Here’s another post that you can now “down-vote twice,” as you appear to be accustomed to doing."
• Re: RAM: It isn't free . . .: "Good sir, no matter how many times you throw garbage in my face, or throw gloves at my feet, I will (well, almost ...) never “downvote” any one of your posts, although I have up(!)voted quite a few"
• Re^2: RAM: It isn't free . . . (No, but its damn cheap!): "And to think that you have, for all these many years(!), so vehemently(!) and so publicly(!!) criticized me ... when your hardware, and therefore presumably also all of your projects, have been blissfully immune from the acid-tests of ... commerce?!?!?"
• Re^5: RAM: It isn't free . . . (over-commit allocation -v- actual use): "A very good point ... (upvoted ... (P.S. believe it or not I don’t downvote you))."
• Re^4: What 'should' a professional PERL programmer know?: "BrowserUK, your bitter personal animosity towards me (and studious unwillingness to take downvote-responsibility for any such commentary), simply gets in the way of this and many other threads. Enough is enough. Quit peeing in the PerlMonks Pool."
• Re^6: What 'should' a professional PERL programmer know?: "I rarely, if ever, find occasion to speak negatively of the content of your posts"
• Re^2: Desperately need help with threaded socket: "I think that you, in particular, have an exceptionally clear “bit of clarity” to offer to in this sort of situation. I think that you are an expert whose insights will be particularly valuable here."
• Re: Multithreading How do I share hash of hash of arrays: "...as BrowserUK correctly insisted"
• Re: The Boy Scout Rule: "Hear, hear!"
• Re: Using threads to process multiple files: "Upvotes all around, sirs ... as BrowserUK excellently describes"
• Re^3: Process large text data in array: "We know that BrowserUK, in his daily $work, deals with enormous datasets in very high-performance situations. If he says what he just did about your situation, then, frankly, I would take it as a very well-informed directive to “do it that way.”"
• Re^4: write hash to disk after memory limit: "As BrowserUK noted, trying to invoke the memory-cleaner only makes this bad situation worse"
• Re^5: write hash to disk after memory limit: "I definitely want to suffix this post with all of the extremely-valid points that BrowserUK made ... As his Voice Of Experience™ says"
• Re^3: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "Of course, and as you of all Monks well know, you will need to use a “sliding window” scan through the compass of the entire file"
• Re^5: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "You spend far too much time making knee-jerk reactions to my posts, on the assumption that I don’t know what I am about, and am speaking to hear my head rattle. You asked for serious responses. I tried to give you one."
• Reaped: Re: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: ""Do, please, enlighten us, Oh Great Master! We are all humbly groveling at your feet"
• Re: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.: "Yes, I am unfortuantely well aware that BrowserUK and (by my rough estimate of downvote counts) about ±7 other Monks), “has a fan-club” But I n-e-v-e-r respond to any post here as (as the NodeReaper just told me) “puerile trolling.”"
• Re^3: MJDs Contract Warnings - courtesy of Perlweekly: "Heh... “Tom would whip you into shape, fairly quickly,” just as he once did me"
• Re: Why Boyer-Moore, Horspool, alpha-skip et.al don't work for bit strings. (And is there an alternative that does?): "I know that you don’t like to hear from me – that you emphatically don’t want to hear from me – that some folks think that I am talking to hear my head rattle..."
• Re: ithreads memory leak: "Truer words have never been spoken than what BrowserUK just so-well said"
• Re: Can I/O operations on the same IO::Socket be executed in different threads?: "Excellent thread you refer-to ... just tossed-out a bunch of up-votes"
• Re^3: Can I/O operations on the same IO::Socket be executed in different threads?: "Yes, I did up-vote (yes, I said up...) BrowserUK’s comments to this thread and to the other thread that he referred-to ... while also (intending to be) speaking very favorably of it."
• Re: How smart is 'seek $fh, $pos, 0'?: "Very interesting results, BrowserUK ... As I well know that, in your line of work, BrowserUK, they often do ... very much so"
• Re: Odometer pattern iterator (in C). (Updated.): "I have not delved too-deeply into the various code postings (especially yours, BrowserUK ...)"
• Re: Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts.: "I even had a London Barrister contact me, again, unsolicited, and specifically offer to track down BrowserUK all the way across The Pond and to haul him in front of Her Majesty’s Court on my behalf"
• Re^5: Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part VIII): Software Craftsmanship: "Chuckle ... you ... actually ... said that ... to BrowserUK?! Quite obviously you have no idea that he is one of the most highly-respected Monks here ... and quite-deservedly so."
• Re^3: The problem of documenting complex modules.: "Excellent thread, BrowserUK ... very thought-provoking throughout, and showered with up-votes."
• Re^3: validate variable-length lines in one regex?: "as BrowserUK originally suggests below ... (All now liberally sprinkled with up-vote pixie-dust...)"
• Re: Perl how to join all threads: "note one of BrowserUK’s comments, found in the “do not mix” thread cited above"
• Re: Perl seg fault while joining threads: "BrowserUK, you’ve had plenty of experience with both Perl threads and libraries. In your experience, does this Perl-specific COW behavior typically cause grief in cases like this one? (And, BTW, I mean that as a serious, face-value question, addressed to an expert in such things.)"
• Re^2: Looking for ideas: Converting a binary 'flags' field into something human readable: "That seems to me to be a “at least fairly genius” suggestion. Promptly upvoted."
• Re: Experimental features: autoderef vs postfix deref: "I will frankly agree with you, BrowserUK. (Upvoted.)"
• Re: Optimized remote ping: "That would require an approach such as the one BrowserUK suggests. Now, BrowserUK, since there isn’t any sort of “connection” being established here, is it ever possible for the returning ping-packets to be dropped as they pile-up waiting to be received?"
• Re^2: Memory efficiency, anonymous vs named's vs local subroutines (anon < named ): "I’m sorry, BrowserUK, but I really don’t quite understand the last sentence in that post ... I implicitly assume, always, that “you know whereof you speak,”"
• Re^2: Output Queue from Multiple Threads: "If you do want to use an in-memory queue, BrowserUK’s Q module (see above) looks “tiny and excellent.”"
• Re^2: Perl system command memory usage in threads: "Say, thanks for pointing out MCE. I had not known of this module before and it looks to be perfect for something I’m about to do.   ++"
• Re^6: Perl Hashes in C?: "Good sir, you responded quite brilliantly to this post, once again demonstrating your quick and well-seasoned technical skill. Every one of the posts in the thread promptly got up-votes from me as well as (I see) many others. Deservedly so."
• Re: How do you share an object(Telnet Session) between threads?: "As BrowserUK ably suggests..."
• Re^3: Perl 6 on Windows 10: "I do, indeed, agree quite completely with BrowserUK’s voice of experience on this matter. (My laptop camera, if turned on, would right now confirm the presence of vigorous head-nodding on my part ...)"
• Re: Imagination greater than reality?: "I will indeed specifically follow BrowserUK’s recommendation"
• Reaped: Re^2: Fastest way to lookup a point in a set: "there are IMHO very few people on this forum who have more practical experience in these matters than this respondent, BrowserUK"
• Re: Perlish approach to parsing a binary blob: "BrowserUK is a recognized master of this sort of thing"
• Re: Algorithm inspiration required.: "(P.S.: I am perfectly aware of just who the OP is, and I already regard him as an expert on big-data problems. “So, just skip it this time. Please.”)"
• Re^3: Algorithm inspiration required.: "My goodness! How utterly disappointing. Please rest assured that I have no such opinions concerning you ... “Very good day to you, sir.™”
• Re: Algorithm inspiration required.: "My goodness – it sounds to me like you need to spend the next several days at the pub, until you feel better"

While admiring your Wile-E-Coyote-like bouncing back after being flattened, I find your sycophantic dishing out of praise to BrowserUk a bit creepy, especially the superfluous "Upvoted" and "Fav'd" comments.

Update: I noticed some recent nodes written with the same distinctive sundialsvc4-style typography, stylistic devices and flowery analogies   (Just askin’) (“Schweet!”)   (“Priceless™ ...”) and yet were posted anonymously:

• Re: Need help making the change to OO
• Re: if statement consolidation
• Re: perllVm: A Linux test of how Perl and LLVM would work together.

Updated since the original node was written with more recent examples from the long-running and fascinating BrowserUk-sundialsvc4 "relationship". :)

To be sure, BrowserUk calls you out severely when he believes you are wrong.

Just for counterpoint, I didn't start out being quite so direct in my responses. Here are a few earlier posts where I attempted to inform him that he was providing bad information:

• Re^4: How do I cleanly kill a spawned process on Win32. --

  "How?"

• Re^3: Better algorithm or data structure? --

  "At this point, I can say no better than; "Show me the code":)"

• Re^2: In-place sort with order assignment --

  "No. I read you the first time.... As for all the "old-timer" logic. Been there, done that. (Don't ever wanna go back:)."

• Re^2: A matter of style: how to perform a simple action based on a simple condition? --

  "Would you expect a non-musician to be able to work out how a piece of music will sound, from "a glance" at the score?"

• Re^2: Perl5.8.4 , threads - Killing the "async" kid --

  "You don't even know the difference between threads & Thread as you keep conflating the two. And yet, you continue to keep offering advice based upon your misreading of the documentation."

• Re^2: Changing registry permissions --

  "More of your trademark, utterly meaningless "advice"."

• Re^2: fixed set of forked processes --

  "Please don't suggest the use of Thread::Queue::Duplex until you've used it, and therefore encountered its limitations."

• Re^2: Looking for advice on how to tune stack size for threads --

  "Sorry, but this is another case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing."

• Re^2: Simple date and time manipulation --

  "Prove it!."

• Re^2: Cloning shared hashref --

  "If you'd bothered to look, you'd have realised that the sole purpose of Clone::clone() is to perform deep copies. If you'd looked at Storable, you'd have discovered that it doesn't export a routine called clone(). And if you bothered to try dclone(), you'd have found that it produces exactly the same error."

• Re^2: Array or Hash --

  "Utter drivel."

• Re^2: [OT]: threading recursive subroutines. --

  "Once again, you offer a few authoritative sounding 'wisdoms' in place of 'an answer'."

• Re^2: Multi-kernel processors. --

  "You're talking bollocks again! If a process is using 100% cpu, it cannot be doing any I/O. If it is doing no I/O then I/O cannot be a constraint of any kind, let alone a fundamental one. Why do you continue to spout such shite?"

As you can see, I started out with gentle nudges and corrections. It was only after they were completely ignored that I gradually ramped up the directness of my replies.

---

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

The start of some sanity?

Please, do keep it up. A lot of times I about choke on my coffee going "wtf!?1" when I read his posts and then I see you've already called him on his vaguely theoretical bs and then I smile because you've saved me the trouble of having to do it.

I share roboticus' methodology in this post they wrote for upvoting, but with one further addition... I'll usually also upvote an OP for showing appreciation to the person who solved the issue, and/or all who provided aid.

As far as downvoting is concerned, I believe I've only used two downvotes in my near three years here on PM. With that said, I'm not against downvoting, as it allows one to create thresholds as to what they want to look at. If something is very offensive, over-the-top derogatory or just plain stupid, I want the option to cast my doubt on that post.

All in all, even if PerlMonks has a few rogue a-holes who just downvote everything, they're likely the type who don't have many votes per day to begin with, and most likely will get bored with it and move on in short order. Also, I'm a *firm* believer that the vast majority of Monks here are positive people who are here for the benefit of the community, so they would rather upvote a good post than downvote a bad one.

If a post is good and one receives negative feedback/votes by a couple douchebags thinking they are going to upset the system, the rest of us who really care will wipe those votes out in a heartbeat.

Down voting stays imho.

Steve

Update: To further, I believe I have had but two posts out of the ~200 I've written that ended up in a negative state. That is very constructive criticism, as it shows I'm doing something wrong. In both cases it *was* my mistake, and I believe in each of them I updated the post with such a statement. At work, I WANT both my staff and other departments giving me this critical feedback, as it allows me to not only become more effective at my job, but it also allows me to build my character. It shows I'm willing to communicate and respond to complaints, and that builds stronger teams and morale. I give props to BrowserUK for his approach of commenting on his downvotes. That's a tactic which I am going to forever remember and use.

I've made 741 ++ votes and only 7 -- votes, but I wouldn't want to see down-voting go away. I assume that the threat of down-votes prevents a certain amount of nonsense, and regularly receiving down-votes probably drives away a certain kind of problem user.

"I feel that the posting of negative feedback on anything is, as eBay for example certainly regards it, an act of declaring that something is actually bad. That it has been made with “bad” motivation. And I simply do not think that people on a forum ought to be given the opportunity to express an opinion like that."

Why on earth not? Yes, my judgment that a post was made from "bad motivation" is exactly why I would vote it down. I wouldn't vote down a post for being honestly clueless or wrong, or for being poorly written, as long as the poster seemed to be doing his best. But when it looks like a troll, or is insulting, or ignores the question in favor of pushing an unhelpful solution, then I may cast a down vote. In short, I won't down-vote someone who's honestly looking for help or trying to be helpful, but I may when it's clear to me that helpfulness was not the goal.

I suspect most people vote that way. I know I've been just plain wrong on a couple of solutions I offered, and I still didn't get down votes, presumably because people could tell it was an honest mistake and I accepted their corrections gracefully.

(Sometimes I'm tempted to down-vote for sloppy writing, but I resist that unless it's combined with another reason. It's not that hard to tell the "knows English but can't be bothered to write correctly" posts from the "doing his best with a foreign language" posts, but I wouldn't want to guess wrong. I do draw the line at up-voting those posts though; no one who can't be bothered to capitalize the first letter of a sentence will ever get a ++ from me, for instance, no matter how brilliant the content. But that's just me.)

"This is nothing personal; this is not a rant; I have a Rhett Butler approach about such trivialities."

Sorry, but no, you don't, or you wouldn't be posting on the subject repeatedly. And to be brutally honest, perhaps you shouldn't be blasé about this. If more than a negligible percentage of the votes you receive are negative, then maybe you should be concerned about it. Stop telling yourself it's because some one person doesn't like you, and ask yourself what there might be about the way you post that makes people react that way. If you're truly trying to be helpful and you're getting down votes, there's a disconnect there, and it's up to you to find it. I say this with nothing but kindness: we all need to stop once in a while and say, "Wait a second, is it me? Am I just being a jackass?"

Another option: make a few posts anonymously, chosen randomly from your usual postings. Do your anonymous posts get down-voted too, or just the ones where people know who you are? That will tell you the score, if you really want to know.

No.

My first impression when I read the heading: Oh no, not another ebay.de!

I don't know about international ebay sites, but the german one has removed the "downvotes" for vendors. Vendors can send a neutral or positive rating, buyers can additionally send a negative rating. Sure, the rating system was abused by some people, but without any way to tell others that a buyer shows unwanted behaviour, the rating system on ebay.de is essentially useless for vendors. And neutral is the "new negative".

What does that mean for perlmonks? There is no neutral vote, just up and down. Remove down and you get a completely useless tool, just like the page visit counters on every web page in the 1990s.

I use the voting tool as a shotcut to "punish" bad behavior or really stupid posts with downvotes, and to reward good posts. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yes, there are trolls around here, some plain stupid ones, and a few some very clever ones. The former disappear rater quickly, but the clever ones are harder to handle. I downvote troll postings of both kinds, even if that does not hurt the XP of the clever ones much. But even if I prefer upvoting, I would really miss the downvote function.

Alexander

I just got my first post that got a net negative evaluation, and there was no mystery to it: I mis-posted and somehow double-posted trying to fix it. I didn't get burned at the stake, and ended up gaining a few experience points, where I might have made twice that if I had posted correctly. The downvotes give an incentive to not screw up and get it right.

I would really miss the downvote function.

I don't know, the new neutered downvote function dosn't seem quite as useful as the old unfiltered one

Dear Monks,

I don't know how many 'down-votes' I've used over the last few years, and I don't know if any one else does what I do before voting. In the last year or so, I read all posts before voting for any of them. Sometimes that has been hard to do, but I want to get a feeling for the value of the question and the value of the answers before starting to vote.

Many times I have been amazed by great answers to questions that I saw as trivial. If the whole post turns into a 'rant', I just skip it and find another sequence of posts to read.

That said, I see a new type(to me) of poster that asks a question showing that they don't know anything about Perl, and after a monk supplies an explanation and sample code, the original poster goes back and updates the original question with "Update: I fixed it myself" or something like this. Before I started reading the entire sequence of posts, I skipped this 'self-answered' post and the real monk that deserves the '++" was ignored. If I remember correctly, in one case they actually cut and pasted the real answer into the updated question.

I think I have found a good use for the 'down-vote'!

Just my 2¢

Proposal: How about...no?

On some of the communities I'm a member of, this has been suggested time and time again as well. And every time it's been suggested, it's been shot down. Why?
There's a number of reasons. One is that we want to express our opinion. That goes without saying -- imagine if this applied to real life, in terms of free speech, perhaps. Sound like Germany in the '40s to you?
Also, it is almost a given that there are some, well, assholes in every community. PerlMonks is no exception, and there always those who enjoy downvoting everything they can just to get that thrill of "I just made somebody's life miserable. That felt so good!" And then they do it again and again.

I'm always amazed at how easily people get irritated, often over the most trivial of trivial issues.

Okay, I'm done. :-)

The problem here is that person is complaining about the downvotes -- he won't stop being that but he wants the downvotes to stop

I can say, with very high confidence...it ain't happenin' bro B-).

:-)

~Thomas~
bless( $you ) if $you->{sneezed};

I personally downvote all posts (here, and wherever else I have that possibility) that use double spacing after each sentence. Yes, I was taught that convention when I learnt to type (back in the 1970s). But I also learnt (in the 1980s?) that with "modern" fonts, it no longer has any justification: today, apart from being ugly, it just looks like a ridiculous affectation.

So, henceforth, consider me as Yet Another Sworn Enemy. Any posts violating my sensibilities in this respect will be systematically downvoted.

That's what I think.

P.S. If you ever posted a line of code from time to time, rather than subjecting us to your usual boring, cliché-peppered (and often misleading, if not downright wrong) ramblings, maybe you would earn a small bit more respect from your fellow Monks...

I assumed this was a joke at first, because HTML flattens any amount of whitespace into a single space, so there's no way to tell whether someone double-spaces. (I still do; after 30 years it seems like a hard habit to break, although it is annoying when some web-based editors try to "help" by turning the second space into a non-breakable-space HTML entity.) Then I noticed that the OP does have really long spaces between sentences, so I checked the source, and he's actually putting a non-breakable-space in between two regular spaces, resulting in a (more-or-less) triple-space! Carry on.

Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.

What arguments or discussions from elsewhere on the Internet might you bring to the discussion that I am (still...) trying to launch? Or should I just saddle up my pony and vamoose?

out of votes, but ++

Brother sundialsvc4 I thoroughly disagree.

This community has A LOT of personality, for better or worse. Seems like the whole of open source is like that. Leveling this out by removing the negative opinion is not a good thing.

In fact, some of what you posted smacks of mind control and thought police and ... sheesh. Haven't you noticed that about your post? After all, just because a node has lots of up-votes it doesn't mean that the node has the right answer.

Leave down-votes intact.

It seems that sundialsvc4's account was hacked during August 2011, for an imposter masquerading as sundialsvc4 posted:

Humble Monks, I just spent half of my “dog votes” today voting-down this entire thread

What do you think?

I think you should change the nature of your responses so they're not pointless distractions -- stop trolling

Are you recommending people should stop posting only when their drinking? How absurd.

I'm going to jump on this, and reflect on one of my earlier posts within the thread.

Because coding is a side-effect of my job, I don't often get a chance to look at PerlMonks until 18-24 hours late. That means my posts are often forgotten.

If one would go through my history, they'd find that I'm positive across the board. Unfortunately, because I'm usually late to the party, the code I've provided is forgotten because it is lost in the obscurity that is yesterday.

I have many 0-3 votes, simply because I was late to the game. I'd rather my helpful posts as a 0-2 show up as useful than a 0 that matches it that is a piece of fuscking spam or whatever.

A -N is much better than my quality 0.

You have my sympathies, but I think you're going after the wrong problem. I've been on the receiving end of that treatment myself -- I was daring to argue with someone who was clearly initially down-voting everything I said, in addition to responding to me -- but the thing that was most interesting about that was the pattern of up-votes happening with the person I was arguing with. Everything, even trivia, seemed to be getting a few up-votes: I strongly suspect he's using sock-puppets to vote for his own postings.

The fact that we don't have any sort of real, verified I.D.s means that the entire XP system is essentially a toy, which really can't be taken seriously. You can hack on it all you want-- eliminate downvotes, forbid voting in threads you're participating in, add "meta-moderation", whatever-- but it'll remain an easily gameable toy.

I have doubts as to how much damage one person can do to another with down-voting, even with sock puppets. Looking at my own posting history, I have made 248 posts which have received a total score of +1634, for an average of +6.6 per post. I assume I'm pretty ordinary; the most I've gotten for a post was +26 (for what I thought was a fairly routine bit about web servers and CGI -- not even directly about Perl, oddly enough) and my least was -1. (Which appeared to get two -- votes because I implied that negative look-behind is a "recent" regex feature. Oops.) No really high ones or really low ones.

So anyway, to give me 15% negative votes, as chromatic reported above, my arch-enemy would have to vote at least once on every single one of my posts. That would be too obvious if he did it from a single account, so maybe he'd divide it up with a couple sock puppets. Then, so it still wouldn't be obvious, he'd have to down-vote some other people too (and really, is the kind of person who would do this likely to only have one target?). Then to keep from getting penalized for too many down-votes, he'd have to spread around a lot of up-votes to other people -- and not just to his sock puppets, or that would be obvious too.

So I'm guessing that to make it work and keep the accounts functioning and avoid getting caught, he'd have to spread around a dozen or more votes for every negative one he gives me. And I'm not that prolific; I only post once or twice per day. To keep up with someone who posts several times a day, he'd have to spread around several dozen votes. That means more time, and even more sock puppets, just to have enough votes to keep up.

I don't know; maybe I'm not dastardly enough, but it just seems like way too much work to me.

Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.

aaron_baugher:

but it just seems like way too much work to me.

Well ... uh ... perhaps he could write a script? I hear perl is nice...

/me ducks and runs...

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

I am more interested in what people have written than how others voted about it.

The voting system doesn't reliably distinguish between "good" and "bad" posts, for any definitions of good and bad that are useful to me.

I suspect you are no less likely to have a sworn enemy if downvotes are eliminated.

If you have a sworn enemy and they can't down-vote you, then they have to resort to anonymously replying rudely.

That's true. I'll happily click a -- button in many cases when I can't be bothered to type out a negative reply. Don't force me to!

Well, frankly, I agree with Dr. Richard Feynmann on this one: “why do you care what other people think?”

Quoting Feynmann to support your thinly veiled whining about getting downvoted is, frankly, very offensive and I'm sure the good Doctor is rolling over in his grave right now.

If you really don't care, you can do what I did and just log out: let your words stand or fall based on their own merits rather than playing some silly ego game.

FWIW, as much as this post is asking for it, I didn't bother to log in and downvote you

--The Anonymous Monk formerly known as rowdog

Personally I down-vote all the posts I see just to be non-biased. I'd down-vote my own posts if it would let me.

(Aside: why can't I down-vote my own posts? I understand why I'm not allowed to up-vote them.)

Update: thank you whoever downvoted this post. I would have done it myself if I could.

If your suffering from sockpuppets, I suggest making some of your own to upvote yourself.

That is against the site rules