I've gone back and read a lot of Wassercrats' postings, and at first, they're pretty normal-looking stuff. But people chose to abuse him, so he got irate. Problem is, he's also a self-described Perl newbie, so he can't fall back on a bunch of XP or grand aura of a module he wrote.

Mob rule quickly took over. Hundreds of downvotes for - near as I can tell - "Anything in a Wassercrats post that isn't perfectly acceptable by the Perl community gets a downvote."

Well, that's just crap, my friends. That's high school clique-ish cowardly behavior. If you can't take criticism - even if it's not (in your opinion) polite or comes from a newbie - have the courage to just SHUT UP. You don't need to reply to every percieved insult to you, PM, the abs() function, Perl, Larry Wall, the number 42, or the letter Z. You don't need to waste your votes downvoting stuff like that either. Go upvote some stellar post by someone else. Much more constructive.

Wassercrats posted over and over in his earlier posts that he was a Perl newbie, which was also obvious based on some of his questions and opinions. However, several monks chose to treat him as if all wisdom imparted should have been instantly absorbed, agreed to, and followed. Suppose your answer wasn't very clear? Suppose he doesn't agree with you? So what if there are a thousand other programmers who do agree with you? LET IT GO. From whence comes the imperative that he has to agree with you?

Later on, Wassercrats became /ahem/ rather bitter and posted some things that were just plain trollish. I can't defend that, but at that point, it was all, "But S/HE said THIS first! I should be allowed to flame! You should understand!"

Just keep telling yourself that. Flames are a waste of space, especially cowardly flames by Anonymous Monk. Anybody who has used AM to flame someone has my full contempt. Gutless nonsense.

If you want to see it stop (and let W have some hope of ever having a non-negative XP again), it might be a good idea for folks to

stop taking the bait.

End rant.

--J