One problem at Perlmonks is that sometimes SOPW's questions do not generate any replies. This can be due to poorly formed questions or questions outside the expertise of monks online at the time. But sometimes questions just fall through the cracks; everyone thinks that the other monks must have answered it. Such a situaton is disappointing for both the SOPW, who was not enlightened and experiences Warnock's Dilemma , and the the monk community, who are a helpful lot that don't like the thought of ignoring people.

One way to ptach those cracks is to indicate in Newest Nodes the number of replies to a question, or at least whether there has been no reply to a question. That way I and other monks could direct our sometimes limited energies to those questions that need it most.

This idea is not a panacea, as the existence of replies doesn't imply useful replies. But it may help to mitigate the worst effects of Warnock's dilemma for hopeful supplicants.

What do you think?

-Mark

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Avioding Warnock's dilemma (try my sidebar)
by grinder (Bishop) on Oct 24, 2002 at 08:11 UTC

    I am working on a Mozilla sidebar for the Newest Nodes. It's more or less ready, but it doesn't yet do as much as I'd like it to. Nonetheless, it shows quite effectively how many replies a node has with a minimum of fuss. I find it is much more concise than reading Newest Nodes directly.

    It let me see quite easily that after a day or so Parsing CCL (Common Command Language) using YAPP had not received any replies, which is why I front-paged it. And I notice that it still hasn't gathered any replies.

    And anything that unburdens the PM database from producing yet another dynamic page is a Good Thing. If you are interested in taking a look at the sidebar, you can find more information about it at http://grinder.perlmonk.org/sidebar-setup.html. /msg me with any comments you might have.


    print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'
[reply]
Re: Avioding Warnock's dilemma
by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Oct 23, 2002 at 23:58 UTC

    If you read sopw from Seekers of Perl Wisdom, you will see the number of replies listed for each, as well as being able to read all the most recent root nodes on one page.

    After Compline,
    Zaxo

    Edit by tye for mispelt "Wisdon"

[reply]
Re: Avioding Warnock's dilemma
by hossman (Prior) on Oct 23, 2002 at 23:43 UTC

    Better then just the number of replies, would be the number of total comments in that thread (ie: a recursive count of the replies to the node and it's children)

    (of course, that would be usefull on all of the pages, not just Newest Nodes ... but this has all been brought up before)

[reply]
[reply]

Back to Perl Monks Discussion