Just lately there seems to have been an upsurge in the number of newbies asking obvious questions, getting hit by a barrage of downvotes and then disappearing, never to post again. There is, of course, no reason to fear the downvote, but it's plain to see that many newbies are seriously discouraged by it.

True, their questions might be `bad' but I think there are cases where people trying to learn Perl really don't know where to find the answers to obvious questions. I'm sure there are lots of people trying to teach themselves to program from nothing more than the standard perl docs, perhaps because they can't afford to buy Learning Perl or whatever. It can be done, but it isn't easy, especially for people with little programming experience.

So I was wondering if it might be worth creating a new area, purely for newbie questions. Somewhere that newcomers can post questions they fear may be obvious, or could be answered easily by reading the right documentation, or knowing the correct incantation to mutter at the search engine.

Now, while we don't want to discourage anyone, we don't want to encourage them not to bother learning how to use the Perl documentation, for example. Therefore, questions posted in this area would be worth no XP, neither ++ nor --. Furthermore, it would only be possible to start new threads until reaching the level of acolyte, say, by which time they should have learned enough to know the sort of things that should be asked in Seekers of Perl Wisdom.

I'm sure there are flaws in this idea, and perhaps the question is `if they can't just learn from their mistake and carry on, are they any loss?', but I think it's something that might be worth considering.

-- 
flay, here to learn

In reply to Silly questions? by flay

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