The fact that discussions and "feel-good posts are a much easier way to gain XP's that code is a well-known fact of "Life at the Monastery". It does not prevent the people who post the most code, who are also the most helpful ones, to be on top of the Saints list.

Maybe it's because of personality voting when they post in discussions, maybe it's because of the sheer number of posts they emit (when was the last time you saw a thread without tilly or tie getting involved? Unless merlyn has already given The definitive answer to the problem of course ;--).

In any case this is good. In the end the Good Guys win.

As for the Monastery growing and being filled with discussions... well, nobody's forced to read everything. The system allows you to discriminate posts by subject (the title) and by type (the section). That's already a lot of information just from the Newest Nodes list. Then if you don't like the first lines of the first post of a thread you can always hit the back button and look for something more interesting... I agree though that a threaded interface would improve the ease of reading the site. Too bad I lost the one I wrote a couple of month ago in my last system downturn :--(

I am a little more concerned about problems with searches. I agree that search is usually used to find either code or at least technical informations. Not too concerned though because a Super Search on "Too late for -T" returns 9 hits (well, I guess it will return 10 hits as soon as I post this...), 8 of which include only technical information. Guess which one is the useless one? Or the 2 useless ones now? ;--)

But in any case, how about using Super Search and searching only in SOPW, Categorized Questions and Categorized Answers? On "Too late for -T" this returns exactly 2 hits, with the reason for the message, how to use perldoc perldiag to find it yourself, even a pure-Abigail message pointing to man perlop... who needs a FAQ when you can get this...

It might be a good idea if His Highness could just add a littlle checkbox by the search field so we can even more easily limit our searches to SOPW, Categorized Questions and Categorized Answers. But in any case you are always 5 clicks and a sentence away from getting the result from Super Search

As for the requests , as the author of Increasing the Signal/Noise ration of PM (pure discussion post, lots of rep ;--) I would have to agree with you I guess...