I'm fairly new to being an active participant here, and I'm not of a paticularly high level (yet?) Having done some small bits of helping on other lists, I can telly ou why I would downvote a question (aside from the excellent "how to vote" document Voting Guidelines (or 'How should I spend my votes?'), which should be a first read to understand what folks are looking for on here.

What I think (and please understand that people's milage may vary on this issue) happens is simply the issue of seeing the same question over and over again, with the petitioner having NOT read anything like documentation. Perl comes with reams of pages of it. There is a obvious search box at the top of every PerlMonks page. Going to google.com can bring up a montherlode of info.

I say all this, because most of the notes I've seen along the lines you specify have been "read the documentation" notes, not "don't post that here" notes. Ask yourself why people should take the time to constantly go over issues, again and again, which are well-documented (and writing good docs isn't easy, trust me!) and easy to find. It's a waste of everyone's time, in my opinion.

Now, a neophyte who doesn't understand what they are reading...heck, at least they tried. At least they made the effort to educate themselves. That's a horse of a different color.

A newbie section? I'm really not sure it's needed...you kind of know that you'll get more of those in Seekers of Perl Wisdom than in, say Perl Poetry, on average. But it's worth a discussion, so far as I can tell.

----Asim, known to some as Woodrow.