Personally, I would be against doing this.

I've only been using the site for six months or so, but I've not noticed the quality of postings changing significantly.

I don't think any node is superfluous as long as the person has a genuine question, and that question is being answered.

For me, one of the primary reasons perlmonks is a nice little site is its focus on communication between people. Adding barriers to posting, especially for novices, is going to cause some people to drop out rather than search or RTFM.

(wearing my usability hat - I've done user testing on an intranet that added this sort of feature and users did drop out at the stage when they were requested to search before posting).

While repeated and novice questions may be mildly annoying to some users they're easy to skip over and - more importantly - many people do take the time to answer them in useful ways.

As for searching, I've not had problems myself. Perhaps add a Super Search option to return results by node reputation?


In reply to Re: Loads of Nodes by adrianh
in thread Loads of Nodes by AcidHawk

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