I can get the run of the mill 'use the search function' comments as a friendly reminder. Sure, that makes sense. But the outright unnecessary 'nastiness' just makes me want to never go back! That and arbitrarily losing hard-earned reputation without any reason being given. Constructive criticism is positive, especially if it helps you phrase a question in such a way as to next time get more useful replies. Again absolutely fine. But a totally unmotivated click on the down-arrow when the whole board is so heavily focussed on reputation... Childish.

Still, I think you are right Anonymous_Monk. The same there as elsewhere on the web - one shouldn't give in because of a few trolls. But it IS very dispiriting.

I prefer the monastery!!!

It's not just trolls. It's partially the DNA and forced culture of the place. I have a meditation I may post someday about this idea. The UI at SO is vastly superior to PM but I can't stand being there either for the most part.

Yeah - I guess there's quite a lot of 'bravado' and 'techno-machismo' over there. I get the feeling people aren't posting to genuinely help out fellow users NOR show-off how cool a piece of code they have come up with is. I think they see it that every question answered is an opportunity to show how superior you are to whoever asked it. Naturally you achieve more standing and 'dominance' if you answer (if you can call it that) the question in a way that either puts down or outright abuses the asker... They are like those twelve-year-olds who play deathmatching in Halo on the XBox just so they can scream obscenities down the audio and digitally molest the corpses of dead opponents. Again, colossally childish.

My best pal is the IT director of a fairly large company. He's been programming as long as I have, except professionally of course and using business-type environments like FoxPro and SQL Server. He absolutely REFUSES to ever post there for just these reasons.

Stack Overflow is just not a friendly place. But, yes - I do agree its interface is nice! Although I must say I also enjoy the stripped down, 'bare metal' approach of the monastery. Prior to joining here I'd never had to write posts where I manually marked them up for instance!!! I enjoy that nuts-and-bolts aspect - which to go back to the main thrust of the thread, is oddly more in keeping with the culture of C++ as a language than Perl!!!

"Aure Entuluva!" - Hurin Thalion at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.