Somehow "valid code" strikes me as being a potentially biased request. I've posted code that will run without errors, but what? Substituting BR instead of what someone else thinks should be there, P or whatever, makes the code "invalid". So use P. I said "something like".

Several variations run fine on my shared hosting service. Runs fine in my home computer installation of the forums when testing.

Runs just fine on any other server I've uploaded it on.

There are apparently some reasons why such a simple substitution won't work to someone's satisfaction on PerlMonks, that doesn't make the code "invalid".

Seems to me, there is just no real motivation to change anything or make it any easier for newbies. Real coders shouldn't mind the drudgery of entering HTML every time they want to have a casual conversation.

I came here to get help, and see if there is any interest in some programs I've been working on over the years, some of which I started posting in other threads, but trying to just converse in here is like, seriously?

Why disable linking to a screenshot? Either uploaded or by an image tag?

Just trying to have a "normal" online discussion in here is wow.

Manually insert HTML, no functionality.

I don't see how allowing image tags could cause any load on the server or slow it down, It's just html. The image is retrieved by the browser. But that's another issue I guess.

I thought it would be nice to have a projects area, something else people have talked about doing for years. Just for smaller scripts. Mine are not really ready for GitHub or somewhere, they are too trivial, and I would be ashamed. My coding is amateurish, because I'm not a trained programmer. Maybe someone here might be interested in looking it over, but, it's hard to even describe the program and what it is supposed to do without any screenshots or anything.

And this ongoing nuisance of having to enter html. Compared with the relative ease and better functionality of any other forum, this place seems disfunctional. But my programs are all written in Perl, so where else can I turn?

I like Perl. I think it's amazing. I don't think my programs could be written in any other language, they use precompiled regular expressions. Does any other language have that?

Anyway, sorry if it sounds like I'm being overly critical, but, I worked out several ways to convert newline to html years and years and years ago, back when I first started fooling around with programming because it seemed to me like a basic necessary functionality for the programs I was trying to write.

I can't understand how anyone could live with that day after day.

I feel like I have no choice but to try and say something, because I can't really get any project going in a forum that is such a nightmare.

Tom