Re: Off Topic section

There already is an Off-Topic section: it's called the Chatterbox.

Seriously though, I don't like the idea of a section specifically labelled OT. It's true that people ask a lot of CGI and SQL questions here, but it's usually related to Perl in some fashion. Meditations does get a good number of posts not directly related to Perl, but those are usually labelled OT by the poster. *cough* Ovid *cough*

This topic came up before, but no action was taken. I still think as I did then: keep the site focused on Perl.

Update
I could've put a smiley after the jab at Ovid, but he (and I hope everyone else) got the joke. And as he points out, if the consensus became that the OT stuff was out of hand, he'd refrain from it, and the truly-excellent moderation system here would clean it up.

Comment on Re: Off Topic section

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(OT -Ovid) Re(2): Off Topic section by Ovid (Cardinal) on Feb 13, 2002 at 23:22 UTC
Dinner was pretty good last night. My new girlfriend made up a nice pasta with alfredo sauce, bacon and portobella mushrooms. Very tasty. Unfortunately, I would have preferred onions in it, but she's allergic. I suppose, though, that I could have done the following: `DELETE FROM pasta WHERE mouthful LIKE '%onion%'` [download] Oh, wait a minute, this isn't my journal. What's going on here? Oh, yeah, I'm responding to VSarkiss. Yes, I get away with a lot of OT posts. I even had one monk submit one of my meditations for consideration as it wasn't "Perl related". I have no problem with that. I've solicited other monk's opinions on this topic and no one seems to object to strenuously as most of what I post has at least a peripheral interest to the community. However, as I have stated more than once: I'd be happy to stop posting the OT stuff if the general consensus is that I should. And as for my previous comments on this topic: (Ovid - what's wrong with my carburator?). It almost happened before and now that we have a pmdev group... who knows? Cheers, Ovid Update: I have to admit that I am concerned about my OT posts. If too many people start doing it and we get further and further away from Perl, things could get hairy. I don't mind the occasional OT posts about parking tickets and things like that because that helps (IMHO) to develop our community. My fear is that we might wind up diluting our purpose. An OT section would help alleviate that. Limiting this to monks who have reached a certain level (even level 2) should drastically improve the signal-to-slashdot ratio. Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Off Topic section by chaoticset (Chaplain) on Feb 14, 2002 at 20:11 UTC
There already is an Off-Topic section: it's called the Chatterbox. No, it's called 'home node'. Most of the pictures don't have to do with Perl, and I'd say sometimes that 50% of the content total doesn't have a whit to do with Perl. Perhaps (as the IRC chatter suggests) there just need to be more Monasteries/Coffeehouses/(insert neat site paradigm here). ----------------------- You are what you think.	[reply]