Absulutely 100% right. I'm of the no-such-thing-as-a-dumb-question school. God knows I've asked enough dumb questions in my life. Even if the original poster was being facetious, what could be more relevant than a thread on 'What is Perl, where can I get it, and how do I write my first script?' ?.

IMHO there's some very itchy trigger fingers around. If some monks are annoyed by basic questions, why can't they just ignore them? Perhaps we could raise the bar on the ratio of votes needed for deletion.

andy.