Five years ago I joined perlmonks. Before we discussed a strange regex feature on the German Perl IRC channel, and it spilled over to perlmonks. My first post came out anonymously, but I believe it is the only node I ever wrote anonymously.

Obviously I enjoy my time here, and I want to reflect on some positive and negative aspects of perlmonks. Positive things first:

• Great community; most questions get answered quite well and fast
• Friendly, helpful and witty community
• The CB catches most off-topic discussions
• Very nice link syntax ([mod://CGI], [doc://$@] etc)
• Motivating and IMHO fair XP system

Most of my critisms relates to the technical aspects of perlmonks, which shows its age:

• Poor Unicode support (try to use non-Latin-1 characters in <code> blocks)
• Poor hackability: it's closed source, and even if you get access to the source, it's hard to set up a test system, and to get started hacking
• Unnecessary high barrier to entrance. Why does one have to use <p> or <br> tags to get a somewhat readable node?
• I feel that somtimes trolls get too much attention. I don't have a good solution for that, but sometimes I feel there must be more that could be done. (Maybe grey out nodes with reputation <= -5, hide them and their subtrees by default, and abolish Worst Nodes?)

I firmly believe that these problems are solvable, though I don't see myself in the position to solve them.

Most importantly I want to thank all the monks for teaching me incredible amounts about Perl and about Programming, and for providing me with interesting problems to think about.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.