Right now, we suffer from a practice (NOT a "policy") of approving almost anything which is not blatantly off topic or outright spam. That's an unfortunate practice that seems, to me, to have developed over the last two or possibly three years.

And guess what: in the same span, the volume of well-written SOPW has diminished.

Worse, we have some folk (XP whoring? unable to evaluate the quality of a post? something else?) upvoting questions like the initial one in the thread you characterize as a strawman argument. Take a look at the last 24 or 48 hours worth of new questions. There are certainly some good ones, well asked; formatted readably; and non-obvious. But then look at the rest.

Now, I know the phrase "non-obvious" is a red flag to some, so just to make it clear: If the question is "how do I print hello? I don't understand (some quote from a doc or example). I regard that as a perfectly reasonable question. I still have times when the documentation seems as opaque as some of our laws, but I don't regard a question as reasonable if it leads me to believe the poster hasn't even tried to solve the problem other than by asking others to solve it.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.