I think the same guidelines of post answering apply to any question, regardless of its level. You might point the person to RTFM or supersearch, but it's always nicer to add a personal note such as some example code or an explanation on how this manual relates to the problem.

Of course, that's not always going to happen. Some people believe that since you have to do something yourself to learn, you may as well start with reading when pointed to the appropriate documentation. Or someone might not have time to fill in a longer answer, but still want to leave a starting point. There are probably other reasons for terse answers.

If you don't like an answer, the best thing you can do is to encourage the kind of answers you do like. Upvote the people who go to extra effort to provide personal answers. Give detailed answers yourself, and take a break from questions when you feel yourself getting too burned out to give those kind of answers. There are lots of people eager to answer questions, and the advantage of low-level questions is that more people can answer them (not always correctly, but there was already a thread on that recently).

In my experience, a lot of people do put in work answering even very basic questions. A really vague post about how to make a program that does X (where X is a large task no newbie could accomplish, which isn't even suitable for Perl) tends to get answers from people who have tried very hard to determine what the person actually wants, often reading through horrible formatting to do so.

Well done for not writing RTFM. I've been guilty of it myself, and while it's useful for part of a larger post, it doesn't stand well on it's own. See 1st Monasterians.

I don't think a new section is a good idea, not because it doesn't have value, but because how are we going to get a true newbie (as opposed to a newbie who seems knowledgable, like me) to distinguish. Since moving the Discussion section up to the top of Newest Nodes, there have been a few misdirected posts there which belonged on SOPW.

And really, these services already exist. When coming across such a post, it's probably a good idea to direct them to the apropriate docs and send them over to Perl.org's Perl begginers mailing list.

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

So do you think it would be benefitial to have an "uber-newbies" section on PM? Some place where posts are expected to be from the realm of the theoretical with little or no reading or research attached? Or should the current style of "RTFMing" uber-newbies and pointing them to the docs and tutorials remain?

I think that Seekers of Perl Wisdom is suitable for "uber-newbie" posts, and that the best all-around response to those posts is a pointer to some appropriate resources (perldoc.com comes immediately to mind). As you say, though, sometimes a little more than just a link to CPAN would help.

(And you are in need of more coffee. Caffeine is a sacrament. :-)

--
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

I don't know how others handle things, but when simple questions get asked, I tend to answer with an example and a pointer to related docs as in "here's how you do it, and here's where what happens is explained". If I deem the example likely too much for the beginner to understand I add a comment or two about what the obscure parts mean.

If someone posts a plain "RTFM" with absolutely no pointers at all I'll probably downvote. If someone posts a pointer to a specific doc that's at least somewhat worthwhile. I try to give people enough information so they have a something to start with and a place to look. If the same person repeatedly displays obvious lack of motivation to learn for themselves I simply ignore them from some point on. That only happens very rarely though.

Makeshifts last the longest.