History of the Perl News section

Originally, the Perl News section of the site was not a place where ordinary monks could post. Rather, it was designed to be a local "feed" of Perl-related news extracted from another site. That other site was called Perl News, at news.perl.org.

Vroom created the section on 2000-07-21 (its created-on timestamp of 1999-09-07 is incorrect). The first post to the new section was made at 10:30 p.m. that day, and vroom announced New Perl News Section 15 minutes later.

news.perl.org was, of course, already in operation by then. the earliest snapshot in the Wayback Machine is dated 2000-01-05.

Posts to the section were ostensibly being made by a bot run by vroom. Initially, they were being posted under his own account (or possibly a system account such as root). At some point after the first 18 posts, vroom created the perlnewsbot user account, and transferred ownership of the prior posts to it. Subsequent posts were made by perlnewsbot.

perlnewsbot's run lasted only a few months, however.

Its last post was on 2001-02-16, apparently having been halted even before news.perl.org went dark.

The last post on news.perl.org was on 2001-03-18, with the following item:

See use Perl;

Perl News is going away soon (one might argue it already has :). use Perl is this site's sister site, having all the same news, plus reviews, articles, discussions, and more. The coincidence of the technical difficulties of this site and the imminent migration of use Perl to its new home makes now a good time to finalize the closing of Perl News.
Indeed, barely a month later news.perl.org was gone.

Even though use.perl.org - the site called use Perl; - was the ostensible replacement for news.perl.org, at least as a source of news, the perlnewsbot was never updated to pull news from use.perl.org.

(Interestingly, use.perl.org met a similar fate a few years later. The last post there, announcing its imminent shutdown, was on 2010-09-08.)

vroom opened up the Perl News section for posting by ordinary users in late May of 2002. Prior to that time, only perlnewsbot was able to post there. (vroom posted there himself once or twice before that, using his godly powers. The couple other posts you now see in that section prior to that date were originally posted in other sections and later moved to Perl News.)

A noteworthy figure in all of this is Chris "pudge" Nandor. He was the man behind news.perl.org and use.perl.org. He was one of the lead developers of Slash, the perl-based engine which powered both Slashdot and use.perl.org. Of course, Slash was also the predecessor of the Everything Engine, upon which PerlMonks is built. Both are products of the tiny outfit called Blockstackers Intergalactic (BSI). Sound familiar? That is where vroom, nate, and other early creators of PerlMonks were working at the time. However, pudge says that he didn't really know those guys, even though he was in the same place at about the same time. Different projects. Here's what he told me in a private correspondence:

I wasn’t involved in perlmonks much, but I did news.perl and use.perl. IIRC perlmonks was based on Everything, which was a separate project from Blockstackers, which also created Slash, from which Slashdot and use Perl resulted.

Relevant chronology:

Infrastructure

Originally, when perlnews was automated, it used a dbtable named perlnews. It consists of just a link (URL), and an ID to link it back to the node dbtable. Presumably this dbtable was part of the perlnews nodetype and has since then been disconnected.

The dbtable contains 131 rows: one for each of the 129 posts made by the perlnewsbot, plus two others: Danger when using SUID with Perl and YAS sponsors a new Perl help channel on IRC, created by vroom using superpowers. Those 129 rows have their linklocation field populated, with links pointing to news.perl.org, e.g. http://www.news.perl.org/perl-news.cgi?item=969758308%7C15344, which is associated to Cozens Talks Sapphire. The other two do not have linklocation populated.

My guess is that the original display htmlpage for perlnews rendered this link in the node. Unfortunately, there is now no trace of that original htmlpage code. The earliest vestige we have is from 2005, well after the conversion to a user-postable form. see perlnews display pageX. (Much later, this section/nodetype was mainstreamed even further, by the use of user_postable_document display page.)
There was, apparently, never any edit htmlpage for the perlnews nodetype, nor any other htmlpage whose code could elucidate the usage of the perlnews dbtable.

Of the 129 links in the perlnews dbtable, the vast majority of them no longer point to anything accessible on the web. news.perl.org itself is long gone, of course; and the Wayback Machine doesn't have most of those articles archived. In the cases where it does have something archived, the source host threw 301->404 on most. The sample above is one of the few that actually resolved to the original article (archived).