On the bright side, honest, albeit "useless," replies are still better than trash-talking, which plagues many other areas in the Internet.

As for the XP's side-effects, the XP system does help engage people. Perhaps some people might have gotten engaged too much to the extent of being like an obsessive gamer. But that's a tradeoff and compromise inherited by any reward and compensation system. The design concern is whether you encourage too much more competition than cooperation in a team or community.

I don't feel competition exceeds cooperation here, partly thanks to a well-balanced core group of monks.

Regarding "junk" posts, I would rather tolerate them than discourage them, because once you try to discourage "junk" posts, you vastly discourage the free flow of ideas.

Tolerating different ideas is one of the most important corner stones for technological and intellectual advancement. Granted, some ideas are pure trash but I consider tolerating their existence as a small price to pay for the greater good of the overall progress of the community.

Although the original discussion has been some people not reading a post before replying, some people might have actually read the post but replied as if they hadn't. But every community always has new blood and rookies, who might not offer what considered quality replies. We "tolerate" them not just for the sack of humanity or whatever but for the sake that some of them might become great and actually helpful in the future.

Everyone need to practise and to be taught, during which time he might produce some junk along the way. That's just a natural growth process.

How much you can achieve in life matters more than how much you score on some electronic bulletin board. How much "junk" ideas you can tolerate and how many such "junk" senders you can foster into helpful ones define your own true greatness and the future well-being of a community.

Shared community means you share everything good and bad. So, relax and smell your coffee.

In reply to Re: Please read nodes carefully before replying by chunlou
in thread Please read nodes carefully before replying by gnu@perl

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.