I don't agree that perlmonks needs an "Omit from voting" mechanism - we "just" need to convince the monks that thanking people in public is *not* meaningless.
A note thanking people for their help means that the OP read the replies and found them helpfull. This is a *good thing*. IMO a "thank you node" does two things:
- It shows that the replies helped solve the problem at hand.
- It shows that the OP appreciated people helping him/her.
Both are good. The first one because it helps people assess the usefullness of the replies (even if most monks can already assess the usefullness of a lot of replies by themselves, that doesn't mean every visitor to this site can), the second one because it keeps a sense of community.
I think people who downvote "thank you" notes should think harder about what they're voting on and why.
Please feel free to downvote if you don't agree.
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I certainly respect your disagreement and your points are all well taken. However, the present -4 rep. of the node to which you replied furthers my arguement.
All of a sudden my standing in the community has taken a hit, not because I have made an inflammatory statement nor proffered code riddled with syntactical mistakes or common logical errors, but because people disagree with my suggestion.
This is, of course, their right and I applaud you for replying with your arguement if also downvoting my node, however, my reputation within this community should not be effected by the merit of my feature recommendations nor by certain monks' distaste for nodes expressing gratitude for a helpful response.
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I had considered downvoting your prior node, though I chose not to. Let me explain a few of the reasons I though to downvote your node.
You don't offer any support for your position.
From the context of the discussion it's clear that you feel that your proposal would solve the problem of thank you nodes (that I assume you feel are of value) being devalued by the comunity. However I think that does not enforces a value but rather a lack of value on such nodes. Worse still it can be seen as an acknoledgement by the author that nodes marked as such are not of value on their own.
Your solution is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
From time to time trolls wander in to PM, some times they gain a few levels before unleashing their vitriol on their fellow monks. Before long those levels are retracted as they lose experiance points. If trolls could simply mark their posts as "Omit from Voting" and feel free to flame, and then downvote those that respond (and get the exp from that voteing) there would be little reason to refrain from doing so. Voteing is supposed to be a comunity feed back on a node and a limited form of control on behavior. If you remove the risk of penalty you remove the pressure from the comunity to behave properly.
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All of a sudden my standing in the community has taken a hit, not because I have made an inflammatory statement nor proffered code riddled with syntactical mistakes or common logical errors, but because people disagree with my suggestion.
Your standing in the community shouldn't be affected that much from a single -4 node. Nodes in Perl Monks Discussion are usually voted on according to agreement / disagreement, especially if they propose changes to the perlmonks site. which is sort of useful if you want to assess the amount of support for such a change.
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