"He didn't show any effort. If we delete it, that will discourage such things."?

Personally Ive written the kind of "theres a better way to ask your question" posts many times. No doubt you have too. We all know monks who on one occasion or another have. But have those posts discouraged such things? A little perhaps, but not much IMO. The only people who know about them are the ones that have done some digging, and they arent likey to do such things in the first place. So for me I tend not to write such nodes anymore.

Now on the other hand there are newer younger monks who are learning, if one of them wants to advise a hapless colleague on how to reap the benefits of the Monastery then fine. And I personally (and feel in general saints should) reserve -- and deletion votes for extreme situations beyond HW, but I dont shed a tear when a really HW type question bites the dust.

I think that a little effort by the pmdevils (and I know I speak more than I act :-) to put some better links and warnings about writing nodes on the creation point (especially for novices) would make a much better contribution to dealing with this problem than dealing with each in turn with a helping hand. As I said earlier theres lots of good nodes on writing nodes in the archives, in both root node and reply form. Why dont we dig some out and reuse them? Then if a node gets deleted at least people were already warned.

Just my $0.02

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demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}