I can appreciate your frustration; it can be difficult to get the hang of a new community--especially if you're not completely versed in its area of focus and/or familiar with its culture.

Perhaps you may wish to step back a bit and follow some of the threads for a few days. That should give you an idea of the type of information people are looking for and responding to. Furthermore, you may wish to check out Best Nodes and Worst Nodes to see what works here and what doesn't (respectively).

In addition, I highly recommend taking a peek at turnstep's home node, which collects a number of useful links to various nodes and updates a few of the FAQ's that are getting a bit long in the tooth. That'll give you a very good base for understanding the community at large.

Simply put, it's going to take time for you to overcome the initial resistance you've encountered. Don't worry about it; just focus on learning Perl. Work on some, get stuck, use Search and Super Search to see if the answers are already online, and (if not or you're still stuck) then post.

You may wish to wait a while before trying to help teach Perl. Make sure you have a firm understanding about the language, as well as the resources available for learning it. It's great that you want to help people learn it; to do that, you need to know it first. (This is not a place for "those who can't, teach.")

Learn what's here and what's not. When you find things that aren't, then write up Tutorials, Meditations, or what have you. PM is a pretty open community, provided you play nice. You've (inadvertantly, I'm sure) gotten off on the wrong foot. Don't sweat that...just start participating professionally.

When you do that, the points will (eventually) come.

--f

FYI

I know from my experiences as a newbie here that it takes a while to understand the going ons of PM ... and I am still learning. I got -- for my first post, learned my lesson and moved on.

I commend footpad for the post. It is tough being a newbie sometimes, especially when other people forget that they were not born experts. footpad was not demeaning, he provided help and guidence to a newbie that is obviously experiencing some problems getting off on the right foot. That is the exact attitude that will keep PM a friendly and helpful place for people to come and learn Perl ... which should be our main goal for being here.

I just wanted to express why I ++ Footpad... I felt that he acted profesionaly and humanely ... and I highly value both of those qualities.

Ducati

============================================

"We rock the body to rock the party ... until the party rocks the body"

De La Soul

Since just a little before you posted this legitimate-sounding question you posted suggesting that a porn section be added here, I'm rather reluctant to respond since you certainly are behaving like a troll some of the time (a troll is someone who says things on-line for the sole purpose of getting a response and doesn't really mean what they are saying) so I'm not convinced that you really don't understand what happened and/or want to understand.

I was "here" yesterday when the tide turned against you. You posted, in fairly rapid succession, 10 one-line quizes. Before you were half-way done, several people were publicly asking you to stop (in the chatterbox) and some indicated that they had sent you a private /msg about it. But the new postings continued.

This was enough for some to decide that you were intentionally being annoying (being a troll). It was enough to convince others that you were annoying (for whatever reason) and needed to at least take some time to better figure out what the site was about.

In any case, by ignoring the many requests in the chatterbox (both public and private), you convinced enough people that you were a problem that some of them voted against your 10 quizes.

At this point your 10 quizes were removed for 2 reasons: 1) Everyone agreed that they weren't done appropriately and 2) They were getting down voted by those mentioned above so removing them saves you from further XP loss.

Then, in response to suggestions that you "at least" put the quiz questions into a single posting, you actually admitted that you had posted them all separately for the purpose of getting more XP from them (so that you could vote for Eureka_sg's nodes!). That clearly shows that you don't understand what this site is about (or that you may understand but don't care because you are really just being a troll).

So if you are here just to get XP so you can vote for Eureka_sg's nodes (and he can vote for yours), then your postings are going to be uninteresting and you aren't going to get much XP for them (and voting for each other won't add up to much XP unless you post a lot, and a lot of uninteresting postings gets annoying which leads people to vote them down which makes you lose XP). In other words, that isn't what this site is about and your plan isn't likely to work.

If you'd like to talk about and learn about Perl, then I will certainly welcome your mature involvement in our little community. But you'll have to be on your best behavior for quite a while as many members have now tagged you as a troll and many others strongly suspect you are either a troll or are about to become one.

Back to the timeline... Right after all of that you posted the quiz questions together in a single posting. Several people had already mentioned that your quiz questions weren't very interesting ones. But I suspect the bigger problem was that you had already convinced a bunch of people that you didn't "get it". So your new quiz got voted down quite a bit.

At this point I voted to have your combined quiz removed for the sole purpose of saving you the XP loss until you had a chance to learn from your mistake or to prove yourself too immature to learn from it. I'm sure others voted to have it removed just because that were still annoyed at you (for good reason, IMHO).

Your title seems to indicate some confusion. There is no one "mind" to be made up here (unless you are talking to yourself). We are a community of hundreds. So being even mildly annoying can get a posting voted down by a fairly small fraction of "us" so if you are mildly annoying in a very visible way, then you are probably going to get a reputation on your node below -10.

Instead of trying to get XP, try to learn and discuss and think. Ask interesting questions. Provide interesting answers. Participate in the community.

If that sounds good to you, then your best bet is probably to not post for a while and just read nodes and get the feel for the community. If you are sure that that isn't what you were looking for, then (to be blunt) please just leave. I hope you choose to stay, though.

Frankly, I have been ambivalent about the quizzes that you have posted. I upvoted one of them and have not voted on any others. Why did I upvote one? Because I liked the thought that someone (you) were trying to be creative. It's vitally important to any community that new ideas get injected into them. One quote that I like (and paraphrase), is "Biologists have a special word for the term 'stable': dead".

Part of the issue that you are having is that you are new in the community. Anyone who is new to a community will tend to encounter a bit of resistance. I might be able to get away with posting quizzes (but not in Seekers!) because I have been here a while and am well-known. You, as brand new to the community, are more likely going to have to earn your spurs before everyone just lets you ride.

Is being forced to prove yourself fair? I'm not really sure. On one hand, we don't want a bunch of brand-new people coming here and not respecting the community. On the other hand, we always need fresh blood like yours (it's just a shame that we had to spill it :) Think of the usenet faqs you have read, assuming you have been on usenet. They invariably warn you to learn the culture of the newsgroup you are posting to before posting. Don't take this personally. I think it would be better to view it as a learning experience. As for myself, I lurked here a while before I made my first post.

I hope this doesn't dissuade you from enjoying what Perlmonks has to offer. More than one monk has gotten off to a rocky start before "fitting in". Welcome to the Monestary!

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

Who dare to say a Siant is wrong?

Well, me for one. I can point to one saint who makes plenty of mistakes. Sainthood is not like the papacy -- we can all make mistakes. The saint to whom you refer mentioned that he thought quizzes for newbies might be a good idea. I don't disagree with that sentiment, but I'll disagree with the idea (which I don't think he meant to impart) that this means users should just post questions in Seekers of Perl Wisdom for purposes of quizzing. That section is for people who *really need help*; seeing your quizzes could confuse them -- as evidently it confused several monks who tried to answer your questions. I'd go even further and say this site doesn't have a good forum for posting quizzes. If a special 'quiz' section was set up, that would be a proper forum. But why duplicate our resources? If you want to quiz yourself, hie thee to Q&A and just look at the titles of the questions, come up with answers, and then compare against the answers that are posted. Or read through perldoc perlfaq.

A while back, zeno wrote Yet Another Perl Aptitude Test; if you want to make it more newbie-friendly, you could modify it and post it in Code.

There are lots of ways of adding quizzy content to this site without adding lots and lots of nodes.

I don't think anybody objects to your desire to help. Many of us would just prefer that you find a different way to express it.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp $n = <STDIN>; $r
+ose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$other
+_name\n"'
[download]

If someone says water is good, that's not an excuse to start spraying people with a hose.

When you've just entered a new on-line community, post once or twice, and then take in feedback and adjust before posting again. You'll learn the local customs, and, more importantly, people will see that you're adjusting to the local customs. In that way, we'll become familiar and comfortable with you.

Also, take what Saints say with a grain of salt.