I'm not here for the XP. I'm here to get and give advice and be part of a community.

Time passed, and the monk heard the faint echo of his words from a distant hillside. And suddenly the monk was enlightened.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

I wasn't going to vote either way on your post (upd: on second thought, I probably would've ++'ed it) but, like Macphisto, I disagree with the 'other users' list.

I do not think that you're ever going to get any useful information from doing it, although you might. Even if you do, I think that you should be keeping these lists private.

Publishing it like this makes it seem like you are accusing everyone in the list and letting "God sort out the innocent," as it were. I realize you don't intend it this way but I feel that is how it's comming across.

So, I have decided to -- it. It's nothing personal. I do appreciate what you do for this community but I feel that in this, you are wrong.

bbfu
Seasons don't fear The Reaper.
Nor do the wind, the sun, and the rain.
We can be like they are.

Why? Because I didn't realize it was a module name. Because I thought I saw a new syntactic feature in Perl that I didn't know about before, not even where I should begin to look for it.

So I asked.

/J

Well, that's one! Thanks for the feedback, even if it's vague. That's more guts than most of the personality downvoters we have here.

That's all I'm looking for. Some sort of sense (even if it's "I don't like it") if it gets downvoted so quickly.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

That's all I'm looking for. Some sort of sense (even if it's "I don't like it") if it gets downvoted so quickly.

Perhaps this might help. Let's revisit the post in question.

That'd be described in perldoc base, wouldn't it? Have you looked there first?

The factual part of the post is

That'd be described in perldoc base

Leaving

, wouldn't it? Have you looked there first?

If these phrases aren't factual, what are they? Well, to my ear,

, wouldn't it?

is a transparent shorthand for

, but you should know that.

and serves no other purpose than to deliver a soft-gloved backhand. Thus offended, it's easy to read

Have you looked there first?

as another barb. Barbs words now outweight factual words 7 to 6. Leave off the barbs and you have

That'd be described in perldoc base

Fix up the formatting a bit to embolden "perldoc base", and you have a nice, succinct, factual response with no baggage.

I'm afraid there's not much more to give you than vagaries. I have personality voted in the past, on you and others, both positive and negative, but I haven't done that in a long while. The vast majority of my votes are spent in a gut reaction to whether I *feel* a node is good or not, based on whatever criteria happen to be fluttering through my brain at the moment. Does it suck, or not? Do I like it, or not? The criteria are always a little different for me; I would venture to guess that the same is true of many others. It's also why I don't explain my votes. This will be the only thread where I ever do that, and I'm only doing it now because I'm tired of it coming up over and over.

Greetings merlyn. I'm just curious: To what benefit would it be to isolate however accurately those users who "personality down-vote" certain posts? Granted, I think it's fairly lame that your eloquent and (I think) useful post was down-voted to a -16 (when last I looked), but so what? I would think that getting upset about it would only encourage the down-voting behavior. Anyway, just curious. I'll still respect and admire you regardless of your PM score because I find your posts (and books) to be overwhelmingly helpful.

I do have a problem with your matrix on personality votes. I remember the first time you posted your snapshot of potential personality voters, I was logged in, had just been cruising the site. I was not listed as a supect. Perhaps that could give you a good start to who was definitely here- if you take away the people that run chatterbox tools such as dusk.
On the other hand- next time you log in, see how long after you log in before you show up in the users around the monestary. It usually takes me several clicks for me to show up in users.

I agree that that the votes you are recieving are a stupid immature thing to do, however, starting a witch hunt does not seem much more productive.

Humbly trying to correct a saint without ticking him off %^)

I don't think voting for president is a parallel example. It even reads different: "voting for president". You're electing a person to trust to make future decisions that favor you.

This is voting on a node. The author of the node should not be a factor in the posting. This is punishing a node simply because it shares authorship with other nodes that you may or may not have liked.

That's what I'm trying to get rid of. Let nodes stand on their own. Vote the node, not the poster.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

It's not completely parallel, but there are similarities. A lot of my opinion of Bush was formed by the way he handled himself and the way he spoke. Listening to his butchering of the English language did not make me confident in his ability to perform other tasks. I get a similar response sometimes when reading your replies. I get the impression that you're not really a person I would like to meet in real life because of the persona you present. One gets the mental picture of you being a very haughty person who doles out information when absolutely neccesary, and then it's always with the inflection of "why am I bothering with you?" Granted, I'm sure you're not like this, but this is the impression I've gotten from your participation on this site. Every now and then you will provide a sharp answer dulled by some humor, or give a bit more information than the bare minumum. These posts I gladly ++. You must remember that for the majority of the people on PM, this is the only contact with you they will ever get. There's been a heated discussion on a mailing list that I subscribe to about how one needs to conduct oneself in a virtual environment, because (perceived) character traits tend to get over amplified.

All I'm saying is that it's very easy to come across the wrong way in a setting like PM, and you have a tendency to sound demeaning and are very terse. Plus, you can't go through life expecting everyone to like you. I will admit that you're not exactly my idol, but I do refrain from downvoting your notes simply because they're written by you.

Guildenstern
Negaterd character class uber alles!