Hi Arunbear,

We could also open up our Monastery to discussion about the Kardashians, if all we want is to increase traffic.

There are many reasons that contribute to the decline in participation on a venerable site like PerlMonks. I manage another site (sailing-related), that, like PerlMonks, was way ahead of its time and, in the early 2000s, grabbed a huge share of people interested in the site's theme. Like PerlMonks, it had superlative content and functioned exceptionally well. For many years it was *the* go-to site for the topic.

Now, like PerlMonks, the numbers are trending down, down. The most important reasons have to do with (a) the rest of the internet catching up, and (b) changing demographics, more than with anything else. The quality of the archived information, and of the answers to new questions, has not declined at all. But unlike in 2001, there are now multiple sites offering the same information, and some of them even function better. So now we are no longer the go-to site, but one among many, and in some ways, a little dated. And the cadre of sailors/monks has aged, some moving on, and has not been replaced with an equal number of younger members.

So, yes, we could dilute and even abandon the mission of the Monastery, in order to get more traffic. But another approach would be to try to address the causes for the decline, to the degree possible. One way to do this could be updating the look and feel of the site, so that a potential new user, most likely a "millenial", in the 15 seconds s/he considers the site, quite possibly on a mobile device, is enticed to hang around, rather than feeling like s/he accidentally stumbled into the Wayback Machine.

And if the decline continues, well, so be it. I for one would rather have this Monastery decline in traffic but maintain its quality and value as a source of learning about Perl, than to increase numbers at the cost of hosting a bunch of crufty content, that might be related to Perl on some spectrum of relativity, but is not actually about Perl.

The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

In reply to Re^2: Find your own monastery: "Perl 6" is not Perl, and Perl is not a Dinosaur by 1nickt
in thread Find your own monastery: "Perl 6" is not Perl, and Perl is not a Dinosaur by 1nickt

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