Well, obviously something is wrong. You don't see many other sites using the source code, even in a modified or generic form. And they have been hacking away at the code for years now.

Personally, I like the perlmonks community, but I think the website just plain sucks from a design point of view.

There might be several reasons for this, but the inescapable truth is:

Perl hackers are some of the worse web designers in the world.

The Perl community is infamous for having poor websites. Some of these poor sites have been recently updated. Take for example, www.pm.org www.perl.org. And I could single out the personal websites of many Perl programmers, including one famous one in particular, but I won't do that.

There is such a thing as a professional web designer, a person who is highly skilled in the art of webpage design. It is an art and a profession. But it has been my experience that this profession is not very respected by systems administrators and programmers.

Knowing basic HTML and being a life long systems administrator, who also happens to know a few things about Perl, doesn't make you a good web designer. System admins make the _worse_ web designers, but they just love designing crappy websites just to show that they can do it.

If this website is to improve, the people in charge (and yes, there are people in charge, so don't give me any of that egalitarian crap) need to step aside, but that's not going to happen anytime soon IMHO. This is their baby and they have already demonstrated that they have a nasty case of separation anxiety.

While I would like to see things improve, I have learned to enjoy the PM community and not to let the details bother me.

In reply to Re: Open sourcing perlmonks by jacques
in thread Open sourcing perlmonks by BUU

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