We may at some point introduce a voting system on WP Questions, but we will put some careful thought into avoiding arbitrary outcomes.

I understand your experience on Stack Overflow. As I wrote on the blog today, I’ve had some humbling experiences being shown up by other programmers:

http://blog.wpquestions.com/2010/01/08/humbling-experiences-when-other-programmers-have-simpler-code/

That goes for forums, as well as paid projects.

— lawrence

People that do know what the answer is will either provide the answer or ignore you. Often, people ask questions for which they have absolutely no capability for understanding the answers. That’s when they get ignored.

You may want to watch how Stack Overflow is operating to see the “classical” model in operation.

It’s an excellent example.

My reputation is at -1 because I incorrectly answered my very first question which should have been a comment, but I didn’t know that, and didn’t have enough points to even provide a comment.

So I was tooled by “lizardboy,” the highest reputation user on the whole site. 15 years of experience means nothing. One simple mistake and some anonymous doober renders me ineffective.

Please don’t do that here.

BTW, for you newbies, “cutesie” anonymous handles like “lizardboy” were how the internet operated 15 years ago. Everyone used a nick. Using your real name was somehow gauche.

Don’t believe me, go wading back through usenet in the early 90s.