If on an electrical forum, someone advised OPs to test for mains connection by sticking their fingers in the socket; they'd rightly have their posts removed.

Bad programming advice and suggestions may not be life threatening; but they are a waste of a newbies time, potentially career threatening, and poisonous to Perl's reputation if followed.

The war against one Monk's perceived incompetence seemed childish when it amounted merely to downvotes and snide comments. Now we're moving solidly into cyberbullying and censorship.

There is nothing "perceived" about his incompetence; and no "war" from my perspective. It's not his name I consider, but his content. If he doles out bad advice on cgi or html, that's for others to consider; but when it's on a subject I know a little about and he obviously knows nothing, I take it as my responsibility to protect newbies from his blathering.

As for patience. I first started questioning his content in 2008; by 2010, I'd started politely asking him to "Show me the code" and expending considerable efforts demonstrating how out-of-date(about 30 years) his suggestions were; and some mild mocking to try and get the point across.

See here for more of the history.

I think moving to using consideration, only after 9 years of questioning, exhaustively demonstrating, gentle mocking, outright & forthright telling him to stop wasting other people's time with his terrible -- sometimes bordering on criminal -- "help", has demonstrated more than enough "monk-ly patience".

My dear brother, marinersk, I applaud your sentiment and believe that all (or at least most) here are all in agreement regarding reasons for Consideration.

The war against one Monk's perceived incompetence

If I am guessing correctly about the identity of the individual in question then it is important for us to analyse their behaviour. Given the sheer quantity of misinformation contained in their posts over the years it seems scarcely credible that they are in fact that incompetent and the only conclusion which I can draw from the corpus is that they are feeding bad advice to wisdom seekers on purpose.

This is trolling, pure and simple. The cause does not matter to us (although it probably does to the monk in question and those who care for them) but the effect would be catastrophic if unchecked. With no other visible means at our recourse to respond without troll-feeding what is there left to do but Consider for reaping any such posts which can only aim to mislead?

Surely we are better than this...

I believe we are. The problem is that he is not. I feel that the best alternative to Consideration in this case is the proposal to flag down-voted posts in the standard view (either by progressively reducing the font size or greying out the text or whatever).

It was really great to be present during the 15 months or so of what will surely become known as the Modern Golden Age of PerlMonks. Alas that it is over and may never return!

I go back and forth on him. He definitely seems to be voted down simply because of his username, even when his posts are helpful. Personally, i try to read the posts before i vote. I vote some of his up, and some of them down, all based on content.

The issue here is many people find him annoying, simply because his style is not usual for the monastery. Even before i read a post, the "look" of the post says a lot to me. When i see many italicised words and ellipses, i already get an uneasy feeling. Not that everyone needs to fit the fold, but because it is so different, it stands out, and almost becomes harder to read. And all this before reading even the first word.

In the content of his posts, i feel like he is giving advice more than answers. At times i feel that advice is decent. However, it was not asked for, and obscures any real answers even if there are any. The problem is further exacerbated when there is an accompanying condescending tone.

He's been treated poorly, yes, but he keeps coming back for more. I took pity at first, but now his name annoys me. It takes some effort to read his posts objectively, and vote accordingly. It would be so much easier if i could just ignore all his posts automatically.

Now, you are really posting about consideration, and not how to vote on the actual posts. But they go hand in hand. Even when i vote keep, sadly, i don't even care if his posts get reaped. How can i care about him, when he does not seem to care about us.

In reviewing recently reaped nodes, I see a disturbing trend.
...
The war against one Monk's perceived incompetence seemed childish when it amounted merely to downvotes and snide comments. Now we're moving solidly into cyberbullying and censorship.

tl;dr

You get some numbers and a curve: statistics. You derive a trend. What trend? This monks activity, something else? How many snide comments, how many valid rebuttals? Numbers about that? None. Deriving from that a war against a particular monk is fantasy.

Long version

Wait, what? War? Seriously? I don't have to even ask the sour moral questions of the like of "do you know at all what war is about, do you know about world war I+II, do you know what happens in Syria, Irak, Afghanistan, do you know of the war of the rich against the poor, the 'war' of the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) against the classical producing economy? etc" but just put it down bluntly, from a soldier's view:

War is like tennis (or tennis is a "civilized" war): it is either you or him - or her, if you play "ladies".

No such thing here. No gunning down. No blowing off the court. There's no single one here seeing his only way to carry on his life (as a programmer, perl addict, know-it-all, you name it) in terminating such "life" of sundialsvc4 - to name the elephant in the room. There is no enemity against sundialsvc4 at all, whom we don't know personally (at least the vast majority of whatever Perl Monk, anonymous or not).

The reputation of Monks is based on merits. The number of points each posts gets is based on it's usefulness, clarity, style, authors merits of course too, and whatnot, for the Monk which gets the chance to see it. Each decision to upvote, downvote, consider or ignore is personal choice.

I'd lump your post into the same drawer as Yet Another Appeal for Civility as it calls for considerate action based on some imagined moral consent, which ain't.

If sundialsvc4 posts good stuff, I vote it up. If it is leading astray, carries bad advice, I'll downvote it or eventually gainsay in a response. If it fits my personal criteria for trolling, I'd occasionally consider it or vote 'reap' if someone else did already.

I don't know what my fellow monks criteria is, by their vote - but it is their own choice, and if the reason for such choice is put down in a proper response, I might concur.

There's no war here against anybody. Yes, Patience is a Monk Virtue; nuff said.

Ha ha, if you only knew the truth, that the downvote manipulation is part of a study the AI team at the NSA does on us, to evaluate our psychological response. All monks go thru it at some point. You are just being tested, man.

"...a disturbing trend"

In view of the energy the certain monks binds and the trouble he causes i wouldn't call this a disturbing trend. In fact i would call the proceedings the right policy: down voting, reaping, caveat lector etc. Disturbing is that he is back. This leads to discord - as in this thread.

Regards, Karl

Its weird lots of other kinds of spam gets reaped regularly but his brand of spam remains ... its why he keeps coming back

LOL

Reputation: -2 (+0 -2)

Surely you saw that coming.