Logging onto PM this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see I'd made it to the lofty heights (well to me) of monk. As usual, there was the number of XP earned since last time I'd logged on, and as I've started doing I went to check the writeups on my home node to see which of my comments people had found worthwhile

One of the thing's I noticed was that one of my node's had a negative reputation. Now personally this doesn't worry me too much - I know I'm still learning Perl-wise and expect some of my comments to be plain dumb, make silly mistakes and so on - esp. since the node in question has a chunk of code attached. Anyway, I thought I'd pop over and see why that node had got a negative rep - only to find that there was no indication.

As someone who's learning and trying to expand their Perl abilities I think the PM is a fantastic resource, a source of knowledge not only regarding Perl itself, but many other facets such as CGI, SQL, and security. Personally I realise that I'm going to learn as much as by getting things wrong as I will by getting things right, and that leads me onto the thing that has led me to this meditation and my first post regarding the workings and mindsets of PM, rather than code specific stuff. Obviously I realise that their is no obligation to post an explanation of our voting habits, and nor should there be - however, someone obviously found something in that node that made them put the effort in to award a negative vote, whether it's just the code, the style or the objective of the code itself. But now I'm left with no indication of what that was, and so no way of remedying the problem.

So my question to the monks is - should we take more of an effort with negative voting to indicate what it is that we find in the node in question to deserve the negative vote, and so pass on some constructive criticism?