Once in awhile someone comes along hell-bent on showing the world that he/she is the master-coder, and that the rest of the world "just doesn't get it" because he's so much more brilliant than them.

That person will invariable post many tidbits of logic and brilliance that happen to carry with them buggy code, incomplete logic, personal attacks, and thick-headedness whereby the person in question refuses to back off from a know-it-all stance long enough to learn something.

Since the Monastery is run and inhabited by volunteers and people who generally carry a feeling of community between them, making this a micro-society, such displays are seen as anti-social behavior, arrogant, and in most cases, unwarranted.

The end result is that the loose-canon individual ends up posting a lot of nodes that irritate everyone else to the point that they start downvoting in mass. A few "worst nodes" are born. The individual then becomes really mad about it, whines about the XP system, and begins trolling with additional nodes that are likely to draw negative votes just to prove the XP system's irrelevancy. After all, how could such a brilliant mind post lots of nodes and still be at zero XP?

What these sorts of individuals usually fail to ever realize is that the deep-negative nodes really were bad news in the first place, and that there is still plenty of opportunity to learn something. I dare to guess that folks in the top-ten Saints in Our Book learn something new at this site every day, and do so whilst (for the most part), avoiding the sorts of attitudes and behavior that will cause them to be scorned by the rest of the PerlMonks.

I don't know which PerlMonk in particular you are speaking of, but I can think of a number of them over the course of the eight months I've been here who have displayed such behaviors. Some never tire of it. Some lob a bomb once in awhile and then retreat for months at a time. Others seem to take pleasure in being a constant irritant; a thorn. And others seem completely oblivious to the reason they've fallen into such a state of ill repute.

The best advice I can give is to simply leave such individuals alone. I need to remind myself that too; our disapproval fuels their fire. Let the flame wars end. The problem with this, however, is the fact that if a bad node is really left to stand undiscussed, uncontested, it might turn up in a super-search by an unsuspecting new Monk who will then waste time and effort in learning a bad habbit. That's the danger of leaving a lousy node alone to the point that nobody responds to it. That being the case, let come the responses to such nodes, but keep emotion out of it. And above all, be willing to forgive and forget! Many people do eventually learn, and do change.

Thus endeth my rant. ;)

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