Well you're asking in the right place, but I'm not the right person to give you a solid answer. Perhaps the gods will chip in. A theory, communities are built, the builders get older and often have less time to spare due to family or other commitments. As you progress in your working life generally more is asked of you, leaving you less time to spare. From the links I gave you, the framework in use here was forked many years ago from the mainline release. Are there fewer active everything developers around? Do those eager for change have the time to commit to learning and developing this? To the first question I suspect yes, I can only think of a hand full of sites still using this engine, which isn't to say they don't do it well (regardless what you think of the content, Slashdot still exists and I believe operates well under a reasonable load of traffic). Would there be more interest from the wider perl community of someone wanted to start an effort to recreate the site functionality in Mojolicious or Dancer2? Perhaps. I think there are many factors to this, and I'm not sure there is no one specific answer anyone can give you which will be accurate, I think more likely a combination of various factors.

Why aren’t you working on making the improvements you want to see?

Because it would be much more efficient to have people who know what they are doing do it. Though I'd love to see the potholes in my city fixed up, it would be quite insane to start learning how to patch the roads myself and then pestering the DPW staff who didn't ask for my help for access to their equipment. In addition, I have no idea if the people who run this site have any motivation to improve it. Maybe they are perfectly happy with it precisely because it chases off the unserious. Or maybe they would love to improve it but need time/money to make it happen. Maybe the last time they tried it was too much headache. Maybe the key guy who did all the original work died. I simply have no idea. I'm just wondering why the site hasn't changed in 16 years.

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I'm just wondering why the site hasn't changed in 16 years.

Why wonder when you can read the history? Somebody already linked a start, all you have to do is read.

Though I'd love to see the potholes in my city fixed up, it would be quite insane to start learning how to patch the roads myself and then pestering the DPW staff who didn't ask for my help for access to their equipment.

Who says crazy people can't make the world a better place too? :-)

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