"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.

Erez,

Yeah I had not really thought my idea through. And thanks for taking the time to write up the history of this in coherent English.

However I don't believe the hardman bouncer approach has much going for it. There are several more modern languages than perl (such as PHP, Ruby, Python etc). If that attitude is allowed to prevail than surely new people will not find perl a welcoming place and will be driven to those other languages and then perl will surely die.

I have an alternative idea. On the SoPW post entry from one could add a separate mandatory textbox, to describe what one has done to solve the problem. This might do a lot to weed out time wasting questions.

On the SoPW post entry from one could add a separate mandatory textbox, to describe what one has done to solve the problem.

That is what the main box is for!

several more modern languages than perl (such as PHP, Ruby, Python etc)

What? If ‘modern’ means “released later”, then, sure, Ruby qualifies; but that seems to be the only yardstick by which such a statement can be made without qualification.