[ snip about killfiling, or scoring down, posts from Google Groups ]
Me too.
But your adding of the "and listened" part swung my pendulum that way.
In my experience, the "and listened" to "gripe about netiquette"
ratio is profoundly skewed with regard to posters from GG.
So skewed that action is required IMO.
[ snip where this poster was an "and listened" type,
yet got plonked anyway.
]
I think that plonking may have been an over reaction, but it was
only one person, plenty of others will still see your posts.
(unless you are on GG, heh.)
I don't plonk for bad quoting.
I *always* immediately plonk griping about the usenet conventions
regarding quoting. (whiners become invisible)
Making the mistake is not rude, insisting that everyone else change
to doing it "your way" is off-the-scale rude.
But people on usenet (and this group in particular) have a nasty
tendancy to flame anyone who is kind of new, or makes an early mistake.
What might be the disease underlying that symptom?
I submit that it is a social clash. Usenet is not like other
interactions that many are used to (phone, email, face to face).
It is its own little society with its own ideas of what is
socially acceptable.
I think the disease is that the poor new folks do not realize that
they are walking into a foreign society. They think it should be
like the societies that they already know.
So they step on toes without even knowing that they are doing it
and, most often, react poorly to the responses pointing out
their transgression.
A little nicety goes a long way.
Learning a bit about a foreign society before jumping into
said society is much more than a "little" nicety.
And certainly everyone on GG isn't a
moron,
The ratio is much much closer to zero than to one though.
but many of us make stupid mistakes.
For me at least, it isn't making mistakes that costs, it is
usually the _reaction_ downthread that earns folks a poor score.
That being said, if you're killfiling me automatically... well, you
won't see this, but I feel worse for you guys.
Perhaps that is because your background is different than "you guys"
background.
Different constraints are very likely to result in different outcomes.
I catch lots of good
information on this group just by reading all the posts. Odds are,
(likely not me) someone on GG is bound to know something you don't, and
killfiling them automatically just means you won't get to learn from
them.
Try, if you might, considering the position of a long time
Frequent Poster (FP), and you might see how what is not right for
you is right for some other group of folks.
Someone who has been here for a long time, say months or years
or even a decade, probably knows lots about Perl already and
has demonstrated a willingness to share it with others.
(Note that these are precisely the people you _want_ to see your question.)
True, these frequent posters likely do hope to pick up new bits of
knowledge now and again as part of their "reward" for donating
help.
Scoring for me is primarily a time-management issue. I do not have
time to read every post, I just want to find "enough" questions
to answer.
I also don't have time to explain to whiners the Darwinian evolution
of "rules of netiquette", what works is institutionalized and what
doesn't work fades.
With GG scored down, I *still* have more than "enough" posts to read.
I also have many FPs scored up, so "interesting bits" are likely to
be visible to me even in the rare cases of a "good post" from GG.
If I had lots of "room" to learn new things about Perl, I would
likely decide not to filter out GG.
After all, most