The way it's set up now, it's full of uninteresting one liners and poorly designed ick... (Along with a few interesting things here and there.)

Knowing that I'm more likely to find what I'm looking for on CPAN than in the snippets and code sections, and given that I don't like to post in them, I tend to ignore those sections completely.

I think that's more likely to be a problem than not getting front paged... could be just me though.

Knowing that I'm more likely to find what I'm looking for on CPAN than in the snippets and code sections, and given that I don't like to post in them, I tend to ignore those sections completely.

Well, I see, and it may well be that others share your feelings. It's a social issue though: it would be enough that you would try on the one hand to give those section one more chance and on the other one to possibly post there some interesting/good code of yours, passing or not passing through a meditation according to your tastes. Personally, I'm positive about those sections, and in case they actually are an underrated or underdeveloped part of the Monastery, I'd like to see them flourish instead. The potential is all there.

There is little enough traffic in News, that it shouldn't cause an appreciable increase in the number of items at the Monastery Gates. Also, News is far enough down the Newest Nodes page that it can easily be missed in the cloud of SoPW's; making News more visible would be a goodness. (Is News even on the Monastery Gates? (Or was that something that I had to enable in my Settings?))

Maybe what we need is a Table of Contents at the top of each page (or at least the Monastary Gates). Then people could see the titles of the current posts and what category they are in and easily jump to ones that sound interesting. This might help promote the sections buried beneath the SoPW posts and help encourage better choices for titles. And if soemthing like this was done in SoPW it would make it easer to see what posts have not been approved yet.

Maybe what we need is a Table of Contents at the top of each page (or at least the Monastary Gates).

FWIW I consider that a wonderful idea, well if not applied to every page that is, but certainly to The Monastery Gates. Particularly useful it would be, if it were possible to somehow manage to make it "unconventional" in that rather than being a single vertical list, would it include several columns, with most of the sections visible at a glance. Perhaps, to make things easier and not too obtrusive, only a very few nodes should be indexed anyway: chosen amongst those that have been frontpaged, of course, but with the higher reputation... so yes, that would form a bias too... but at least equally divided amonst all sections.

You must new around here :)

Brother deprecated delved into this issue many years ago in excruciating detail. Much of what he says remains valid today.

There has been a minor improvement over the years though: there used to be another section called Craft which... also contained code!

You must new around here :)

As new as Nov 23, 2004 at 11:45 GMT-2...

Brother deprecated delved into this issue many years ago in excruciating detail. Much of what he says remains valid today.

Interesting reading! In fact that article focuses on the same bias I noticed and then brings about a discussion of wider breath about the Monastery, but you're right: "much of what he says remains valid today." In particular I feel like quoting him when he writes:

post your code, even if you think it sucks. because I want to read it and learn. Or maybe I want to correct you and have tilly someone correct me on my correction. but code eq growth. and growth is good for everyone.

(The "correction" is mine.)

Yet, I think that as I wrote elsewhere in this thread this is a social issue, and technology can't solve social issue. But... it can help! So I'm still convinced both that at least in principle something could be done to correct the bias and that it would be a good thing to do from the POV of general benefit for the community, along the lines of:

• applying huffmanization and rationalization: merging the various code-sections into one, as suggested by Scott7477;
• implementing a functional tagging system as suggested by Argel and desired by many other notable members of this community, like jdporter - one would have both "official", distinguished tags like qw/snippet cufp application/, and custom ones about the actual subject matter, e.g. 'sort';
• entries from the single code section should be allowed to be frontpaged too, as desired by several people here, perhaps along with a toc on top of the page, as suggested by Argel again. And a kind of toc that would put stuff from the various sections just as much on the same level as possible...

---

Side note: just yesterday I posted two snippets which are admittedly minimal. One consists of two lines of code showing a sort technique. Is it crap? I seem to notice that sorting questions get asked quite often, notwithstanding the tutorials. It has now a reputation of -1. Funnily enough, a direct reply to it which I posted myself to expand a little bit on the subject has a reputation of 2. It's a tiny contribution and I didn't expect tons of votes. But then I wonder how many it would have gained, had I put a random error in and posted it to SoPW under a title like "sort problem". Similarly the other one is a single Perl 6 statement already running under Pugs that shows in a concise manner four features of the language. Reputation 0: complete crap too?

If some form of tagging was implemented it would be easier to merge the three categories and then just tag them as appropriate. Maybe let monks vote on the tagging as well. There are other uses such as being able to tag a post as off-topic. Probably easier said than done though.

If some form of tagging was implemented it would be easier to merge the three categories and then just tag them as apporpriate.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. There's already been some talk about this and such a system seems to be already in place, somehow. A tagging system would solve many problems at once, and not only this specific one of code-like sections. It would give an alternative to those wanting "a new section for"... it would reduce the number of sections actually very similar to each other... it may comprise special, "official", tags that would help triggering specific actions, and so on. I dream of a truly tag-powered PM, like those social bookmarking sites, but... better than them, because this is PM!

One possible approach: since posts in Code Catacombs and Cool Uses For Perl are so rare compared to other forums, front-page them automatically. This will also have the effect of people posting more code.

One possible approach: since posts in Code Catacombs and Cool Uses For Perl are so rare compared to other forums, front-page them automatically.

Not really sure: while precious gems like the one I mentioned can be found there, also pure pieces of crap including hits in the Worst Nodes lists tend to get posted there. Perhaps the fact is that on the frontpage at the top one can see the questions, then at about 2/3 of the whole page below, the meditations, then close to the bottom, obfus and PMD. No code contribution at all.