From my personal history, I'd say that advertising is the most lacking thing about the Monastery. I use Perl from a lot of time (well, my time. I probably started in 1998, I'm not sure), but I came to know PM only this year. While this is undoubtfully my fault, nonetheless I would have been glad to find it years ago - I feel that I learned 99% the 10% of Perl that I know here in these few months.

Continuing on the lines of my personal history, I believed that http://www.perl.com was the central reference for Perl for many years, and never encountered PM there. Also in http://www.perl.org the link to the real Perl community can be easily overlooked: it comes after the mongers' website.

Probably the name itself fooled me for a long time: if I search on http://www.google.com for "perl community", PM pops in the first result page (which is good), but the name is not so attractive (i.e. it doesn't make me think that it's the most advanced Perl community, and this is bad) and the description could be better (not to say that it - ehr - sucks):

Contains tutorials, discussion forums, Perl poetry, obfuscated code, and a large code repository.

This is completely bad IMHO. Perl Monks is much, much more than this. Moreover, as a novice I'm not usually interested in obfuscated code, and seeing about Perl poetry makes me think that I'd be losing my (prosaic) time.

I know that PM is relatively young (only 5 years old AFAIK), so many other places grew up. But I think that a novice to Perl should be able to quickly find PM as the reference site for Perl, avoiding to drown in obscure and wrong-suggesting forums.

This does not mean that there shouldn't be other communities: I want to say that the novices should be able to know that here it's a place where info and answers are excellent, and they should be able to know it as soon as possible.

To summarise in one word, Perl should be better advertised in the places where one would naturally look for info about Perl: the websites above.