Dear Monks,

I don't know how many 'down-votes' I've used over the last few years, and I don't know if any one else does what I do before voting. In the last year or so, I read all posts before voting for any of them. Sometimes that has been hard to do, but I want to get a feeling for the value of the question and the value of the answers before starting to vote.

Many times I have been amazed by great answers to questions that I saw as trivial. If the whole post turns into a 'rant', I just skip it and find another sequence of posts to read.

That said, I see a new type(to me) of poster that asks a question showing that they don't know anything about Perl, and after a monk supplies an explanation and sample code, the original poster goes back and updates the original question with "Update: I fixed it myself" or something like this. Before I started reading the entire sequence of posts, I skipped this 'self-answered' post and the real monk that deserves the '++" was ignored. If I remember correctly, in one case they actually cut and pasted the real answer into the updated question.

I think I have found a good use for the 'down-vote'!

Just my 2¢