So why haven't you written it yet?

I'm serious. If someone wrote a replacement site which managed to capture the nuances of policy we have here -- since we believe it's what has, more than anything else, made PerlMonks successful -- then we could, without a whole lot of effort, port the database of posts, etc. to the new platform. Or we could do something reasonable, like "shadow" them. Anything's possible. But before that can happen, someone needs to implement PerlMonks 2.0.

The initial reason, from years back, is I assumed it would be rejected outright; and it’s just as well, I would have chosen Catalyst and that probably would have been a suboptimal choice these 13ish years later. I went as far as getting a related domain name to do exactly what you suggest, shadow the site as an experiment, and setting up some basics and an outline of reverse engineering. The current reasons include an absolute dearth of remotely circular tuits + analysis paralysis + fear of taking on responsibility I couldn’t handle + distaste for the social aspects of arguing about anything + I’d either be “outing” myself or having to jump through hoops to have a pseudonymous github presence (which I also went as far as setting up). Garnish with I’ve always liked the site okay as is and with tobyink’s skin I like it better and with the ajax voting I put together recently I don’t have any serious friction points.

If it ever in these threads sounded like I was criticizing you or any other active pmdev, I should clarify the exact opposite is true. I am grateful you take it on and deal with issues. The site is fantastic as an entity and while there are several things that go into that it’s only possible because of you and the others who maintain the code.

Thank you. And also I didn't mean just you; I mean everyone who's ever wondered why PerlMonks is still so second millenium.

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

Could you provide pmdevs with a dev version of PM to play with?

From my understanding it means basically mirroring the DB after purging private data.

edit

> managed to capture the nuances of policy we have here

I think there are more nuances which might need to be "re-implemented" too.

Like nodelets, tickers, user settings, ...

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

Like nodelets, tickers, user settings, ...

Yes, all that; but of course it would be an opportunity to do things "better".

I'm still hoping someone will take up the challenge. :-)

I've certainly written forum programs that are capable of replacing the newline character in received form input with an html equivalent rather than just stripping it out, so have thousands of other forums everywhere across the internet.

I don't know why anyone would consider having their "return" replaced with space or nothing, a desirable feature.

I don't think an entire forum platform replacement is necessary just to make a very minor modification to one line of code.

Tom

Well, the one is not related to the other. The answers here never involve the code beneath; and the code is not directly related to the layout. I do not denigrate the monastery in the slightest, only remark that web-development in 1998 was not the peak of its evolution. :P

I completely agree. I just would not like to see PerlMonks with all it's history flushed.

Other than some navigation issues, that take some getting used to, the main ongoing, constant, and IMO completely unnecessary and easily solvable annoyance is my posts are altered in a way that does not reflect my intent.

By hitting the return key on the keyboard twice, the intent is to start a new paragraph. I know for a fact that these newline characters are sent to and received by PerlMonks (the program) but are being stripped.

Instead of hitting the return key once, I have to manually type multiple brackets and backslash, PerlMonks is not content with p but also requires slash p surrounding each paragraph. This all becomes rediculous when posting from a mobile device, where these characters are unavailable.

Sometimes I miss one or the other p and the whole post has to be fixed in preview. The implementation does not seem consistent, so I use br.

The program replaces URL encoded space (+) with space. That was the intent. Why should my (or anyone's) intent to start a paragraph be replaced with a space?

It makes no sense, is annoying and time consuming and completely unnecessary.

To strip the newline character, rather than replace it with an html equivalent is obviously intentional, due to sheer laziness perhaps. My only question is why? It should be an easy fix.

Tom