While I'm certain that such a Growth Hack would bring people back to Engage More with the site, I'm strictly against that.

The email address is collected solely for sending the password and account recovery. Abusing that trust by sending users clingy emails to get them to engage more is nothing that I can approve of.

FWIW, I’m in favor of the sentiment++ but agree with others that it runs counter to the ethos here. It might be better to reach out in other non-user-specific ways in the larger perlsphere. Not sure I have a good suggestion though.

Posts curating or updating old gems would be nice… Might draw one or two folks back.

This sort of outreach is very common and I doubt anyone would be bothered by it.

Funny - I'm absolutely certain that someone would be bothered by it. Just because some other sites abuse the trust of their users by spamming them relentlessly there is no need for the monastery to sink to such a level. All it would take is one person with deep enough pockets and a GDPR lawyer and you could kiss this site goodbye. I'm with Corion on this.

I don't have much to add except a couple links to "GDPR lawyer" for context on GDPR lawyer, which seems very relevant to those who use perl for its native capabilities.

It's EU data privacy legislation. The effect of Brexit is unknown. Here's a link for how it might matter to folks on the other side of the atlantic impact-of-gdpr-attorneys-and-law-firms-in-us.

Is email the only way to do this?

Some people want to have an email notification option for answers - voluntary of course.

This was opposed in the past*, but if we had this feature people could choose on their own if they want to get more emails.

*) IIRC because it's not easy to get thru spam filters and to make new people visit the site regularly.

The downside of annoying folks with spam has already been covered but even worse, it might entice sundialsvc4, Kevin_Raymer and others back. Win's posts were often hilariously inept though so I do miss those :-)

As a person who doesn't log in unless presented with "tough beans" from spam filter, I disapprove of this measure.

The only other websites employing this tactic that I know of are social networks, designed to waste people's time and get them addicted, so the moment one tries to break the habit of checking the feed for more distracting shiny, they tug on the leash to try and make the user return, while the owner of the platform gets money from ads and personal data reselling. While PerlMonks is of course a much nicer place, I can imagine some backfire if we started sending e-mails to people who decided not to visit the website for their objective reasons.

At the very least, if implemented, this feature should have some means of turning it off in profile settings.

adamcrussell:

Like others, I wouldn't want something like this automatically starting to EMail me. Especially if I didn't opt-in to it beforehand.

On the other hand, I like the idea in theory, if it could be done well. There have been a few periods where due to 'things' or 'life', I've not been here for a while. If someone were to build something like a weekly digest that would show the statistics you've mentioned with a curated list of interesting nodes and made it an option where you could opt in through one of the settings pages, I think that would be a cool thing. I might even use it ... if I remembered to do so before 'things' and 'life' got in the way.

The biggest difficulty would be finding an editor who would have the time to curate a list of 'interesting' nodes -- I personally wouldn't just want to see something like "weekly best" as that's just a list of high-scoring nodes. Many of the most interesting nodes I've seen wouldn't even make that list, and most items on that list (when I've checked) are decidedly uninteresting. The problem with a "weekly best" is that it would be dominated (IIRC--I've not monitored it in some time) by well-written questions with a solid well-written reply about an essentially mundane topic. Those, however, are often very commonly asked questions that have been repeatedly answered, which are uninteresting.

I explicitly didn't say "who would have the taste to curate..." because different monks would have different ideas on what would constitute an 'interesting' node, making it more difficult to find an editor. Some monks will be very interested in threads that are rooted in the curious dusty corners of perl syntax where you might have to dig into the optree to see just what's happening. Others may be interested in posts that introduce them to new (to them) topics. (One case I remember is when BrowserUk posted a question that introduced me to Bloom filters, which consumed an entire weekend of time (IIRC).

Other monks will be interested in obfuscation, JAPHs or golf. While I find the discussion of techniques used in those topics interesting, I'm not interested in the topics themselves. I've also seen a lot of discussion about "making XYZ a one-liner". I understand that it's interesting to the people who may ask and answer it, and if I see a clever technique in there, I'll ++ the appropriate node(s). But as I can just stuff the code into a bash function or (more commonly) a script, I feel that trying to force such things into a one-liner (especially at the expense of readability) is pointless.

So the best monk to find the 'interesting' nodes for me would be the very one who would be missing them due to being on walkabout or such. I'm sure that (many|most) other monks would have the same problem.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

How about a Happy Monksday! mail? Seems to be nice in character and will only be sent once a year...

> Seems to be nice in character

The dilemma of internet networks is that even if 99% find something nice, it's the complains of the remaining 1% you'll hear the loudest. ;-)

Nevertheless IMHO a good idea.

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