The beauty of Perlmonks is that it's a basic website. It has resisted the ensh*ttification that happened to other websites, so it still looks like something from the late 90s or early 00s.

I generally agree. It's a relatively clean visual design, no cat pictures and you can usually find what you need quickly (unless SuperSearch times out.... again).

But the pre-Dotcom-bubble codebase also has its downsides. chatterbot exists mainly because it's less painful to generate stats and the ability to "scroll back in the current chat" externally than within the site itself. And there is pretty much no problem, none, with the monastery codebase for which you could quickly google a solution or pull an upstream patch.

Not to mention that JavaScript support would make sense in a lot of places. Input validation, visual editor, autosave-to-scratchpath while working on long posts, better chatterbox, etc.

But it's still one of my favourite sites on the internet.