Well, putting your second point into practice returns a couple of relevant discussions in short order. For example:
Own name in the Other Users box describes the refresh time, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
While I'm still coming up to speed on the internals of the Everything engine, I suspect there's a cron job that periodically regenerates the content of the Other User's list. If this is true, reducing the refresh rate would be a bad idea because it would impact every other process on the host server, including the node serving requests. I can live with three minutes.
If you really want up-to-date information, you can roll your own client, as noted in XML available for chatterbox and other users. I suspect, however, it's very possible you'd really annoy someone if you set your refresh rate too fine. For example, if you requested updates every few seconds, you'd also impact the ability of the rest of us to participate. Given this, you might consider this very carefully.
There are several examples of various PerlMonk clients in the Code Catacombs. Playing with a few would certainly be good training, however, I would think hard about the effect on the rest of the Monastery membership before putting something into production.
Your second point is well-taken and has been discussed many, many times in various threads. I'll leave researching the details as an exercise. :-)
It is a comment well worth repeating from time to time, however, the people that really need to hear it (the new visitors and initiates) rarely seem to make the effort to learn what works in our halls before posting. Indeed, most of us have made serious faux pas in our first posts. It's an unfortunate reality of online support communities. We can certainly raise awareness and strive to improve the visibility of answers to commonly-asked questions. However, there's always going to be some duplication of effort. Sadly.
Here's a challenge for you: Look for questions that are asked frequently and then write up tutorials outlining the general approach, listing documentation sources with links, and ofering a list of the best threads discussing the topic. (I have one of these in progress and hope to post it soon.) This would help solidify your knowledge of the subject, expand the Tutorials, and help link good threads together.
Also, there is one minor advantage to revisiting previous discussions. Since Perl and CPAN continually evolve, we can keep our standard knowledge up-to-date and refine our understanding of that knowledge.
--f
Update: Fixed various typos. My typing sucks. :-}
In reply to Re: 2 Items
by footpad
in thread 2 Items: logging in, and repeated discussions/questions
by bladx
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