Ripping out the display code and converting it into a more consolidated set of templates, or as an intermediate step, into a data structure that is then served to React or any HTML templating system makes a lot of sense IMO! But I've been dreading the large refactor that is necessary, going through all the call-trees etc.

Moving the site away from mod_perl onto Plack also makes a lot of sense. I have a local Mojolicious server that serves a development copy of the Perlmonks site already, but it mostly wraps the single entry into Everything.

I'm not a big fan of React or the other JS-display frameworks, especially for what can be primarily a static site. Moving the chatterbox into a separate component that refreshes (say) via Javascript might make sense, but I think doing this using HTTP endpoints like with https://htmx.org makes more sense. Also, being able to serve the site as static HTML is one of our approaches to stem the constant barrage of bad AI scrapers.

I have a scrubbed copy of Perlmonks (without the votes, email addresses, personal messages etc.) as a MySQL dump if you're interested, and a tools to create that dump at https://github.com/Corion/Perlmonks-Dump, and https://github.com/Corion/Perlmonks-SQLite.