Confessional

For transparency’s sake, the tale. (Though I have a vague memory of talking about this previously.)

The monk who shall not be named *always* rubbed me wrong. Because he seemed senior in credentials and standing I didn’t say much of anything for years. Neither did I downvote because it felt purely personal at the time and I downvoted infrequently in that era anyway.

When it slowly evolved into acrimony, wasted chances, abuse, lies, and I had evolved my chops to know what was what, *and* years of conversation and warnings went unheeded… I wrote a bot to find every post from that monk which I had not voted on. This was years ago. It was something like 1,400 as I recall. The bot was well behaved.

I used the list to visit batches of posts in the browser from time to time. I downvoted 99+% of them. I upvoted some as I recall but, as I had long warned, only posts that were as good as anything top monks write daily. That was maybe two or three of them.

I try to downvote for purely professional reasons but will sometimes downvote for personality and tone if it isn’t accompanied by technical merit; this confession covers both because the monk’s older posts often had undeserved high-ish reputation points. I consider downvotes one of the better features in any social/forum platform. Side note: I generally upvote even poor nodes of newer users to encourage participation.

In reply to Re: RFC: Policy regarding abuses of the voting system by Your Mother
in thread RFC: Policy regarding abuses of the voting system by jdporter

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.