First I'll rebut your rebuttal.

• You called questions from new users clutter.
• You said a plus of the new environment would be that it was friendly and welcoming. How is that a distinction if PM is to be considered those things upon reading it?
• You said "Higher level stuff would be directed to PerlMonks anyway" which means you don't intend your new site to handle "higher level stuff". If your site isn't capable of handling higher level stuff but it gets asked there anyway, who answers it?
• You said you wanted to cause "Less strain on the PerlMonks server" which can only be taken to mean you'd be taking users from PM or making people read two sites. Most people won't split their Perl-questions-on-website time across two sites. Most will be on one or the other. PM would reach down to help new users up anyway. Your site would eventually grow to handle increasingly experienced users as the community forms around it. It'd be Perlmonks:Alternate rather than an adjunct newbie-friendly area.
• The text boxes are not the biggest usability issues with PM in the first place. There are all sorts of nodes for things that have links scattered above the input boxes, in the hep section, and in the CB conversations of the monks. A master directory of useful links would be a much bigger boon than TinyMCE.

Now I'll rebut your new points:

The site would be intended *for* newbies to ask their low level simple Perl questions. I'm not saying only newbies would be on there. With really basic questions most Perl programmers would be able to answer them.

Those users would be the newbies you recruited to your site and the people from PM who gave up time on PM or on #perl or the comp.lang.perl Usenet hierarchy to answer those questions. If you have them ask their questions one of the existing places, there are already experienced users for them to ask.

To be honest the site looks very dated. New Perl programmers the new site would be targetting are likely to be young students 14-21. They expect things to look at lot better these days. If you ask a really basic or dumb question here you'll generally go into negative XP very quickly. I'd be more than happy to provide a new modern interactive design for this site :)

As the saying goes... "patches welcome". The customizations you'd be able to make to Everything2 (which you asked about in the CB) would take you quite a while to even get to where PM is, as the PM developers are still actively improving the site on a regular basis. Much of PM can be styled with CSS that other versions of the Everything Engine can't. Why not offer better CSS themes? Just don't expect to submit an unsolicited patch against stock Everything2 and have it accepted.

I'm a web developer myself, you know. Who says your new, beautiful site would be to my liking? Or to that of any number of others? Yes, PM looks a bit dated. That's because it actually has been around a while. But more changes are made to this than to your download of the code. Why not start here?

You'd have people like myself keeping an eye on things :)

So you're willing to watch the nodes over there 24/7 to make sure the answers are all acceptable? Somehow I think you're thinking of your site filling a great need but getting very little traffic. That's a disparity of thought, IMO. If it's very big need as you seem to think, then it should get too much traffic for one or two people to police it. More eyes on a question bring more different answers, as you can see in many PM threads. Are you ready for your small band of heroes to suggest all of those?

There are other things to consider. PM is only one site, it can only have so much reach on the interweb. A new site on different servers (I plan to provide) would increase Perl's reach.

This is a strawman. eBay is only one site (well, except that they have international versions). The same with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and CNN. CPAN, SourceForge, Tucows, Simtel, kernel.org, and the GNU project (other than that these have mirrors) are each one site. The way to reach new people is to have different types of sites: perl.com, perl.org, perlbuzz.com, perlmonks.org, and others. It's not to have two of the same type of site targeted across a fuzzy gradation of users.

I agree it would improve a few things for a few people. Easy of use for new people. I don't think a lot of the higher end people would like it, but that's just another point towards another site.

There's no reason to need another site to use or not use a visual editor. Lots of CMSes support dozens of different plugins for their content areas. Markdown, BBCode, Textile, TinyMCE, Xinha, FCKEditor, etc. Slashdot gives the choice between plain text (auto paragraph breaks) and HTML (you must break your own). Lucid CMS comes with multiple plugins, and some other CMSes come with multiples already in the package too.

If you're sure HTML is such a problem, then come up with specific suggestions about how to make PM better. Just remember they'll have to be optional.

Finally, consider that lots of people want PM updated and tweaked. There is just not a lot of consensus on what updates and tweaks take precedence. If you have a specific list of things and can get them approved, you'd be helping PM be the site you want. Planning to start an alternative site just so you're the one calling all the shots just seems like an end-around past the process of gathering consensus.

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