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Look, let's be frank here. When you say "when time and time again the same nonsense gets regurgitated" you're obviously talking about sundialsvc4. I agree with the overwhelming majority of Monks that the overwhelming majority of his posts are worthless at best. But I do not believe that they always, or even most of the time, cross into the realm of downvotes or reapage. Mostly the fellow offers vague advice gleaned from a career in IT consulting that peaked about 30 years ago, and is thus often stale, as well as vague and possibly irrelevant. But that's different from offering specific answers that are wrong. He does this as well, on occasion, of course, and such posts should be countered with a reply correcting the misstatement. But what is the danger, really, of leaving intact his barely-related waffling? (In fact, a large portion of the time the advice is quite sound, albeit in a far too generalized sense to be of use to the thread's OP.) I tend to think that seekers of Perl wisdom should be developing the ability to determine for themselves whether or not a particular piece of writing or answer is valuable. If such a seeker, presented with half a dozen concise, code-demonstrating answers to their question, and then a wordy, over-formatted, vague diatribe containing only advice of the most general nature, cannot distinguish between the two classes of reply, well, then I consider that the seeker deserves their fate. All that said, however, I do believe, as I stated elsewhere, that vote totals should be displayed to all readers, when the vote total is high or low enough (based on some as yet unwritten and complicated formula). This -- along with a good deal of retarding use of the downvote on the part of some of those quick to turn to it -- would assist in what I think is our obligation vis-a-vis worthless posts by sundial or by anyone: to warn the unsuspecting reader when there is a real danger of being misled. Being bored or even baffled by the content does not rise to that level, IMO.
The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
In reply to Re^3: Feature: Auto hide. Change: show node vote counts to all, not just logged in users.
by 1nickt
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