When this came up before, the consensus was pretty strong that "Thank you" notes should not be reaped. Now we did have one recent episode of someone posting a "thank you" for each individual reply. But not even that warrants reaping.

I like your terminology: Reaping is for nodes that are blatantly inappropriate or duplicates (and "someone else gave the same (or better) answer" doesn't count!). I suspect Nodes to consider will be changing because this hasn't been sinking in despite it being repeated quite a bit. ):

I don't even visit Nodes to consider much anymore as most of what ends up there is a waste of time and I got tired of voting "keep" on everything.

I'm for having an indoctrination be required as part of the process for enabling the moderation nodelet (as well as other changes that have been discussed when this came up before).

I'd like to suggest that each person can only consider n times a day. Any ideas for n?
Additionally, nodes should not be considered unless there's a reason. When a node is submitted, the user id submitting should be prepended to the reason as well.

I am worried that restrictions like this will interfere with what I see as the point of consideration--stopping posts which really shouldn't be on the site (trolls, personal insults and exact duplicats). Just a couple of weeks ago there was a troll who was posting the same stuff (just cut and pasted monastery content which filled the screen without purpose). I considered about 15 posts by this person in a matter of minutes; other people considered the rest of them (there were at least 20 if I remember correctly--I used almost all my daily votes -- them). There were only about 4 people who could consider nodes on at the time. I don't think the problem is the opportunity to consider any number of nodes, but the choices some people make--choices which will still be made regardless of the number of considerations available.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't consider some restrictions. I see it as only a matter of time before a troll gets high enough to consider and fills up considered nodes by considering everything. And of course there is the current problem of people using it to mark things they personally dislike.

I agree, especially since I've raised similar points pretty recently. :-)

Our first moderation tool is the vote. If you're out of votes, then see if it's a node that can be edited. If so, then privately /msg the poster and nicely suggest an Update. I think most people will happily cooperate once they're a) aware of the rules and b) approached nicely. If you get a rude response, then perhaps it's appropriate to consider. (Personally, I'm not so sure; I'd rather you waited until the next day and voted it down.)

Every online community has its quirks and unwritten rules, as does every newsgroup. We should be patient when newcomers accidentally cross ours. I don't think we can completely expect that newscomers will a) always read the FAQ's and b) fully appreciate the importance of the guidelines provided in those materials. (With regard to thank you's, BTW, there are certain communities where they're appreciated, even encouraged. There are times we'll need to "untrain" people of habits we dislike.)

And, while I'm on the subject...please take the time to enter a *clear* reason when you consider a node. There have been a lot of blank reasons and, frankly, I must be missing something, for I've rarely understood why those nodes were considered in the first place. Given that the ratio between Keep/Edit vs Delete votes is running ~50/50 (+/- 10%) on most of those, at least a few other monks agree.

In the same way we ask posters to provide enough information to work with, I believe it's best we do the same when we consider nodes. Please give a reason, so us lesser mortals can understand the thought behind your action.

--f

As for considering them, nah, not really necessary. Education, not the big LART, is the solution.

Up until now I've been taking the view that the Monastery is almost growing a fantastic Perl help database, and clearly useless nodes are not appropriate (even though the trend is to consider disk space and CPU cycles as boundless).

This seems to jive with the concept of "vote the node" to me, but I'm certainly willing to consider the possibility that I've been wrong.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

If you can find a node that won't get any votes, then just vote it down and "consider" it with a reason of "delete, duplicate" and it will be gone in 20 minutes, probably without a single person bothering to check whether it was really a duplicate or not.

My point? A lot of monks are trying to be helpful but taking the time to actually consider a node is quite a bit of work given the number of nodes submitted for consideration each day.

Even vroom felt that a 3:1 majority wasn't enough to warrant the deletion of a node. And he has even restored at least one node that got reaped for the reason you advocate above.

Reaping isn't going to amount to even a drop in the bucket when it comes to saving disk space. The real value in eliminating "useless" content is to make it easier to find the best content. But for that to be at all successful we would have to reap 70% of the content. Do you really want to do that??

I advocate enhancing Super Search so that it at least sorts results by reputation.

I also encourage those trying to turn PerlMonks into some kind of "clean knowledgebase" by deleting things to instead work on selecting a dynamic subset that can be used as that.

I don't want PerlMonks to be a "knowledgebase". It is much more than that. It is an interesting and fun community with a rich history. Why throw that away?

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

As I think I mostly agree with you but my annoying predilection to counterpoint has gotten in the way here, a number of clarifications are in order:

-While you are probably correct that some people don't pay attention to how they vote, I try hard not to be in that group, I often abstain when I am not certain of my vote, and I often vote to "keep" against the flow. I do find it a bit difficult to believe that a majority of people would go to the consideration page only to vote with their eyes closed, but I guess neither of us will ever know for sure.

-I certainly didn't intend to "advocate" any particular voting margin as sufficient condition for deletion, I was simply observing the apparent inconsistency between those votes and the responses in this thread.

-I know the disk space used by reaped nodes isn't important to most (aren't they all kept anyway?), but I my mention of CPU was to address the effort in searching. I didn't suggest reaping 70% or even 1% of the content, as I am quite happy with 99.99% of it as it stands already.

-Getting Super Search to sort by reputation would be great - sign me up!

Finally I do regret my use of the rather sterile term "help database", as I certainly do enjoy many of the completely irrelevant threads that occur here (just the other day I was arguing in the CB that Cheese was a good example of something that should not be reaped due to the amusement it generated, though maybe it's an argument for a cooling-off period on deletions... no, too many trolls in these woods). At the same time, you will be hard pressed to convince me of the short term or long term value of "thank you" nodes (perhaps we can agree to disagree on that small point). I also neglected to cheer loudly for the nodes that seekers post to summarize a thread and explain their eventual solution (summing-up well usually gets ++ from me).

I believe that Nodes to Consider (imperfect though it is) can be a good noise filter if used properly. I hope this node isn't deleted...

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

It seems a simple thing to send a personal reply in the Chat box that will appear for the individual when they sign in.

This is a great resource for learning Perl, and personal thank you's do add noise to an already vast resource.