The Perl community is infamous for having poor websites. Some of these poor sites have been recently updated. Take for example, www.pm.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.

Of course you won't. It's much easier to throw out vague complaints without actually doing anything about them.

This is their baby and they have already demonstrated that they have a nasty case of separation anxiety.

You're welcome to think that, but you're wrong. I've seen lots of patches applied to add CSS support, improve XML support, and put id attributes on all sorts of tags, making the resulting HTML more semantically useful.

That doesn't mean things are perfect, but the system works and, as I said earlier, I haven't seen a flood of people knocking down the doors submitting patches to improve things. Thus, the imperfect system stays in place, a few people here and there jump up and down and say "Oooh, Ooh, I want to help!" and disappear a week later, and, every few months, someone complains that there's no legion of highly-paid volunteers working on the site full time to implement the shiny new feature he or she just invented.

Take my personal web site, for example. It's not very attractive, but every day someone reads one of my talks or downloads some of my software. Mission accomplished.

Update: Struck out a phrase I wish I hadn't used.

It's not only what chromatic says, but that of all the major Perl websites out there, there are actually very few people involved with the design. The same people seem to do all of the work, and as chromatic says, there are plenty of volunteers whom we never hear from twice.

People can blame me it they like, because www.pm.org, www.perl.org, and your "one famous person" website were or are my fault. It has nothing to do with Perl programming though: non-designers tend to suck at design no matter what they do.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>

there are actually very few people involved with the design

Do you remember the fellow who gave a presentation at a Perl conference about improving search.cpan.org? I remember it. People started interrupting him. Sometimes I have thought of submitting a suggestion in the suggestion form, but then I keep remembering that poor guy.

Please see my comment at alpha-geek, Jeremy Smith's journal, about this very subject. My opinion there remains unchanged.

Of course you won't. It's much easier to throw out vague complaints without actually doing anything about them.

No, I don't mention personal websites, because that would be silly. I probably shouldn't have brought them up in my OP.

I haven't seen a flood of people knocking down the doors submitting patches to improve things.

I see that as a failure in the system. Since this site is very popular, why isn't there that flood?

and disappear a week later

See above.

Since this site is very popular, why isn't there that flood?

I posted a link to my "Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves" article earlier in this discussion.My thesis is that's not how open source works. There are over 75 members of pmdev. How many patches do you expect in a a week?

How many people use Perl 5? Do you know how many people submit patches to that in a week? How about to Parrot? How about to Pugs?

The answer is "Fewer than you might believe." Sure, having the source open makes this possible and easier, but I don't know that I necessarily trust a patch from someone unwilling to stick around long enough to earn a decent reputation and then ask for access to the code. Maybe that policy has prevented a couple of really great potential contributors from doing good things -- I don't know. I do think it's positive in enforcing at least a minimum level of responsibility and accountability, though, and I don't believe there has ever been a huge desire for people to do more work themselves.

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

Ah so. What is it that sucks? IMO its a lot easier saying that than actually offering a detailed review and critique that pmdev can use to improve things.

I'd like to know what you consider to be good design. You mentioned a link in one of your other sites that I followed, but the page doesnt seem to load properly. Is that what you consider good design? Frankly a lot of sites that ive been pointed at by web designers as example of good stuff have themselve been really pretty, and basically useless. PM otoh, is not entirely pretty, (although given how customizable the user experience is this is only an issue for the anony monk), it is quite functional. Super Search works well unlike most sites search features. We provide XML feeds of just about everything we can think of, and seem to be able to provide an enviornment where programmers beginner and experienced can find a place to contribute or learn from. What exactly is it that we doing so wrong?

Super Search does some things quite well but there are quite a few things that many people reasonably expect from a web search that Super Search mostly sucks at.

Several things could be improved with some fairly simple features (like being able to build up the list of matches). But the problem space is rather strangely and somewhat severely constrained and so many things will never be done well by Super Search.

But making PerlMonks robot-friendly will address many of those areas (because google is quite good at one common type of web search, especially if we define a few key "words"...)

And Super Search is good at searching for punctuation, which is a rare treat for me; most searches suck at that, but then I wrote it so there should be something about it I like.

This is all rather vague but most of it is covered in other nodes and I'm not going to spend more than a couple of minutes on this so you'll have to use it if you're curious.

So there is much I like about it, it usually works quite well for me, I'm glad it works well for you, it treats the servers nicely, and I realize many of its significant faults and have plans for improvements for some and alternatives for others. But right now, there are several ways in which it sucks, and not just a little. (:

- tye