Re(2): Beware the Trolls!

"As is the case in so much of life, context is everything. Judgement has to enter into it. Personally, I'm inclined to run the risk of helping the lazy to avoid the risk of quelching someone's drive to learn."

I agree, actually, that of course judgement has to enter into it. I'm mostly referring to those who

remain anonymous (c'mon how expensive or hard is it to create a login here?),
ask what amount to pretty basic questions which would dissolve in a blaze of obviousness after a reasonably in-depth read of the perlfunc manpage, and
obviously don't even bother to try searching the PerlMonks site either for previous answers to similar questions

In other words, yes! Use judgement and restraint.

Update: We must never "lump all academic questions into the category of trolls". But we should favor pointing posters in the right direction over completely solving problems for them.

dmm

You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day ...
Or, you can teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime

Comment on Re(2): Beware the Trolls! Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re(2): Beware the Trolls! by belg4mit (Prior) on Dec 29, 2001 at 01:38 UTC
The ease of login creation isn't so much the issue IMHO. I know that I visited PM several times over several months before creating my account. When every Tom, Dick and Harry's website requires or requests an account for use, most neither needing it nor providing anything useful for doing so, some induhviduals (YT included) eschew obfuscating their lives with excessive underused accounts. Perhaps one means of reducing truly Anonymous Monk posts would be to have an input field(defaults to Anonymous Monk) where the poster could input their email address. Thus allowing easier tracking and ownership of questions etc. by the monastery and the user themselves. And of course perhaps after making any AM post (esp. one with an email address), a friendly message about account creation and benefits could be displayed... `-- perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"`	[reply]
Re: Re: Re(2): Beware the Trolls! by belg4mit (Prior) on Jan 07, 2002 at 02:37 UTC
Someone said: I am unhappy with the idea of associating people and email addresses publically and often. Fair enough(though e-mail itself does that by it's very nature), but the person could enter some other identifier. Their real name, SSN, or perhaps Bob forbid the address for a non-primary email account ;-) And then perhaps the firendly message would say "Would you like to register an account with this username?" Presenting a few radio button options: the entered string, `$username = $1 if $username =~ /^(.*)@/`, and an input field to enter a different username; filtering out any options that match pre-existing usernames. `-- perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"`	[reply]