Something you seem not be taking into account is that it's not the people just posting short replies to anything; there's a constant influx of new users who are asking:

• the same questions which have been answered here numerous times (and of course they didn't bother using the search box first)
• questions that are as I mentioned below answered quite succinctly by the standard documentation (or another well known site / FAQ / text)
• questions which indicate a lack of understanding of programming fundamentals (in as much as there are quite a number of non-programmers who stumble into (or are pushed :) using Perl) or Perl's limitations ("Why does it take 30 hours to search through this 2G file which I parsed into a hash on my computer with 64M or RAM?")

And that's to say nothing of the hordes:

• asking HTML / Javascript / PHP / miscellaneous web questions which have nothing to do with Perl (" . . . but I figured you guys would know anyhow")
• attempting to get someone to write their homework assignment for them ("I have this friend who's trying to . . .")
• expecting free support for some commercial product or service rather than bothering the people they bought it from ("I found this on a haxx0r site^W^W^W^W^W^Wbought this and was wondering . . .")
• mistaking this for freshmeat.net / versiontracker.com / Google ("I need a PERL script to do . . .")
• . . .