Dear marinersk, it appears that you also got downvoted just for having answered to my post! I can figure that out because, after I upvoted your post above, its reputation got to 0, meaning that it was -1 beforehand. These are things that I don't understand...

Just like downvoting a monk who admits not knowing something is ridiculous in my view. I have read carefully the voting guidelines published on this forum, and came to the policy that I would not downvote a post making a big mistake in a coding effort to help out another monk (everyone can make a mistake) or even a post making a claim that happens to be plain wrong. I have been downvoting posts only extremely rarely (perhaps a dozen times so far, twenty at the very most), when someone is stubbornly maintaining something wrong despite having be proven the opposite, or when someone is being blatantly nasty or obnoxious with other monks. I even voluntarily avoided to downvote posts in which I felt that people were being somewhat mean against me personally (fortunately, this has happened only a couple of times), because I thought that this would be improper for me to do so (but I am not saying that I would never do it, I might possibly do it if someone became really nasty against me).

Having said all that, independently of its high technical quality, this is also a very nice forum and, by far, most monks are very nice persons with whom I would be delighted to have a beer or a meal in the evening. I love to be here and easily forget about the very few hitches here and there.

Well, sorry to all if this is an off-topic comment.

To be fair, the off-topicness of such posts might well be why they get targeted. Almost every post I have ever made about votes has gotten downvoted before upvotes came along a short time later.

As you point out, it doesn't really matter; and for me, it's simple. The only goal I've ever had here beyond getting advice and offering help -- which one might argue are the basic privilege and duty, respectively, for anyone of Monk Mind -- was to make Friar so I would be eligible to help out with some of the administrative tasks necessary to keeping PerlMonks alive and well.

Downvotes are highly unlikely to jeapordize that status, so the votes themselves aren't the important part to me. It's the patterns of human behavior that fascinate me -- and, based on the number of conversations I've had on the topic in the past few weeks, apparently they fascinate me greatly.

Truthfully, this particular threadlet should probably be in Meditations or PerlMonks Discussions, but it has also just about run its course, I suspect.

Have a great day, I think I'm done with this for awhile. Back to helping others with what Perl I do know.  :-)