"negative votes count double"

Not Agreed, as you only will make posters not take their posts there, in fear of the XP loss.

Anyway, the whole RTFM issue has been discussed over and over, here and elsewhere. Some consider this (i.e. perlmonks) to be a higher-level discussion board and that we should assume someone has tried reading the manual/FAQ, searched the Internet for a solution, and having failed all these, came here for an answer. In these people's eyes, not requesting an answer without first performing all that is disrespectful for those who visit here, and should not be "tolerated".

Others don't subscribe to this POV, claiming a: not always the "M" is available, or that the asker knows where to look for it. Maybe the documentation is too complicated. Maybe its an undocumented feature/bug. Maybe the search wasn't fruitful because the person didn't know how to identify his problem, and form the right search query.
At any rate, these don't consider the question disrespectful.

Mind you, both sides, and the range of opinions in between them have valid points. One is more newcomers friendly, the other claims that "weeding out" the RTFM questions help the people here focus on the real unanswered question and increase the signal to noise ratio. Both options are valid, both options have merits. Pick your side.

"A core tenant of the greater Perl philosophy is to trust that the developer knows enough to solve the problem" - Jay Shirley, A case for Catalyst.


In reply to Re^2: Special place for RTFM posts by Erez
in thread Special place for RTFM posts by SilasTheMonk

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.