/me too

Also, (as is often pointed out, usually either with disdain or as praise) PerMonks is not usenet. You can't decide that you want to subscribe to comp.lang.perl.syntax but not comp.sci.algorithms.strings.large, etc. There aren't a ton of *monk.orgs to pick and choose from. So it doesn't make sense to say "That's not really a Perl question; it is more an SQL question. So you've posted it to the wrong group^Wsite and if I wanted to hear SQL questions I'd have subscribed to sqlmonks.org and so you are thwarting the whole heirarchy of *monk.org domains that we've carefully set up to allow people to fine tune what topics they are interested in."

You may not want to hear what you consider to be "an HTML question". But a whole lot of Perl programmers do a whole lot of work on HTML and so HTML is going to come up at PerlMonks a lot. But the volume of root nodes isn't so high that skipping the questions that don't interest you isn't a huge burden, IME.

And I have experience with what happens at PerlMonks when "reap: has nothing to do with Perl" is allowed to creep up in popularity as a valid consideration reason.

What happens is that a large fraction of nodes find people who "just don't see" what the question has to do with Perl. And we get nodes reaped that are all about Perl (and a bunch of nodes reaped that are tangentially about Perl and some reaped that are just likely of interest to many-but-not-all Perl programmers).

Having seen the state of PerlMonks when we've only partially started mounting and sliding down that slipery slope of "is that really a Perl question", I can say that it is much worse than the status quo.

I've also heard several members that I respect say that PerlMonks would get pretty boring if only the questions that are really about Perl got asked here.

I don't want to see a huge explosion in questions about vehicle maintenance and subsaharan politics, of course. But I don't see PerlMonks currently having a big problem with the ${volume of off-topic questions} * ${distance off-topic}.

I do do my part to discourage off-topic questions and think others should as well. I /msg authors, down-vote or refuse to up-vote (both questions and replies), refuse to approve, refuse to reply, etc. But I doubt $you and I always agree on which nodes are off-topic, by how much, and what is an appropriate level of discouragement in each case.

But that just leads to balance.

Reaping doesn't lead to balance for this problem.

I've also heard several members that I respect say that PerlMonks would get pretty boring if only the questions that are really about Perl got asked here.

Completely agree. Probably only half the questions I find interesting are directly about Perl. I would be *very* sad if the immense wisdom/experience/expertise that exists in the user base here were to shut down questions because they were essentially not Perl questions but really--take your pick--CGI specification, SQL, algorithm, color theory, design, tech work, approaches to inheritance, other languages, etc.

If anything I'd love to see a slightly more tolerant OT monastery because it would represent great riches of knowledge unleashed within the best-in-class tech community site.

And to bust friedo's chops just a little, with HTML errors in the OP, one might forgive an HTML question now and then. :)

You may not want to hear what you consider to be "an HTML question". But a whole lot of Perl programmers do a whole lot of work on HTML and so HTML is going to come up at PerlMonks a lot.

Oh, but I bet quite a lot of Perl programmers do a whole lot of work on filling their stomachs with considerable amounts of beer, am I to expect something like the following to come up?

Subject: Class::DBI caused unrecoverable system damage

I've had the best part of my day ruined struggling with Class::DBI's xxx feature. Eventually, after many hours trying to cope with it, I decided to give up and I thought "Oh well, let's go out with my friends and have a good pint of slalom or two". Quite surprisingly, many beers later, I suddenly found out The Way TDI(TM), or at least I though I had, because as I came back home and tried my hand at it, mysteriously what must certainly be a bug in Class::DBI managed to make me "rm -rf /"-**k my system. Has anyone experienced anything similar?

Incidentally, as you may have argued, Slalom Strong is one of my favourites...
;-)

I've also heard several members that I respect say that PerlMonks would get pretty boring if only the questions that are really about Perl got asked here.

I partly agree. "Partly" for two reasons:

1. it really drives me crazy to read what are in fact CGI or HTML questions here, especially if they make the implicit assumption that Perl eq CGI - I can't help that. But maybe that's because I'm not particularly involved in these topics, so maybe I'm just being selfish, since I'm much more tolerant of other kinds of OT content;
2. I don't know if I'm a member you respect, but I completely agree that PM would be pretty boring if only strictly Perl-related topics were being discussed here. That is I wouldn't limit the discourse to questions, and I'd enlarge it to a reasonable amount of non-too-off-topic OT content.

Colophon

[OT] Hmm... beer!!