++, but with a quibble. When I wrote Re: History now influences voting, I didn't have the power to consider nodes, and therefore could only downvote them. I now check Worst Nodes for anything that needs considering. Abolishing it would, IMO, make it more difficult for spam to be dealt with as quickly as possible. Besides, some of the entries (what is for key pls has just aged off) are too funny to ignore.

Regards,

John Davies

I agree with pretty much all of this, especially the positives and the thanks at the end. I signed up years ago, but only became active in the last year, and I've already learned a lot and found many opportunities to help others. I've found it much easier to get "over the hump" here than at StackOverflow; by which I mean the XP/role system here seems to make it easier to get started building your reputation and increasing your access without needing to come up with the best first answer to some questions first. (I do think SO's reputation system is good; I just don't like it as well as PM's.) Anyway, it's possible to ease into things here no matter your level of expertise. Even if you don't have anything to say at first, just logging in regularly will eventually get you two daily votes which will grow over time into more, and in the meantime you're getting familiar with how the site works. It's a nice system.

On the issue of the primitive edit box: I use a Chrome extension that gives me a button next to any textarea, which will bring it up in Emacs and let me do my editing there. I don't use it a lot, but I could use that in html-mode to edit my posts, and have a lot more features -- and the ones I'm used to -- than you'll ever get in a browser-based text editor. I think there are similar extensions for other editor/browser combinations, so that may be a viable alternative for people who are tired of typing HTML codes.

I see very, very little trolling or spam here. Maybe that's because I come to the site through an RSS feed, and it filters out negative-score nodes or something? I don't know. But from where I sit, PM may have the best signal/noise ratio of any forum I've ever belonged to.

Congrats on five years, and thank you for being here moritz. You've been an inspiration to me in my three year tenure, and I thoroughly respect how you handle yourself in all of your replies.

You're also responsible for me delving into Perl6, which I'm glad I did.

I hope you stick around. PM is a wonderful place with people like yourself inhabiting the Monastery.

I, too, congratulate you and thank you for being here!

Regarding editing... Lets not forget having to do the ampersand thing for several symbols like square brackets and less than and greater than. And given the prevalence of BBCode, it can be a bit frustrating having to switch gears when creating posts here. And could we please have a <bq> shorthand tag for <blockquote>!? Or even <quote> to be more similar to BBCode.

And I wish they had a plain text mode and check box to lets us choose (and default to plain text). Maybe put a separate text box in for entering code (where everything inside would automatically be treated like it was in code tags and readmore tags if appropriate. I suppose the argument would be many people would not use it properly, but that applies fairly well to the current situation as well.

With that said, the cons are, at the end of the day, annoyances. It's like having major pros and minor cons.

moritz ++

during my perl experience, I more and more realize perl(5?) is not perfect language but perl community is perfect. on CPAN, you can find various treasure and on perlmonks, IRC and perlsphere, you always can find fast,warm answers of your question.

That's why perl is far from die.

One more thing off topic: I believe perl6 is far much more better language than perl5. and I can't wait to use it in product! keep moving mortiz!!