This section is only for discussing issues pertaining to the PerlMonks web site itself.
For example, asking about how things work, or offering ideas on how the site could be made better.
I have an idea! What if PerlMonks would build ChatGPT into the website so when someone posts something that has a question mark in it, the entire post would be fed into ChatGPT and its response would be posted as the first reply in the thread. This would ensure that people get an immediate response. Sometimes there isn't a lot of activity. Now, of course, if people feel that ChatGPT's automatic answer is incomplete or just flat out wrong, they could correct it or complete it with ideas. But I think, it would be a good idea to have ChatGPT's answer in each thread. What do you think?
And just to make things clear, I think, the answer provided by ChatGPT should be copied verbatim and posted as text on PerlMonks, not just a link or a suggestion or whatever, because links cannot be trusted. We're talking about thousands of links. You can't guarantee that those links will stay alive in the future. So, any automatic answer by ChatGPT should be copied and saved on the site if you decide to implement this feature. And I think, it would be very helpful. This move would help bring PerlMonks.com into the 21st century.
It's considered polite to inform about crossposting, so that people not attending both sites don't waste their efforts hacking a problem already solved at the other end of the internets.
...could we add this to our FAQ and make it linkable via "crosspost"?
I've tested it in my On-Site CSS Markup, but unfortunately I couldn't make it work.
I'm too ignorant about CSS to tell if it ever worked or if I did it wrong.
Interestingly did Corion recently suggest a new HTML way to reveal text on click, using <details><summary> :
Click here to reveal spoiler Here is the hidden content
It would be nice if someone tried to combine the two approaches in a way that clicking on an abbreviation revealed the title text.
Such a pure CSS solution has many advantages.
You can use your CSS markup settings for that.
I'm too busy to experiment right now, but wanted at least leave a note for others or for a future me. :)
I talked to a Perl interested person based in Tehran, Iran.
Apparently, they cannot access perlmonks.org, even by using a strong VPN / Proxy combination that usually is enough to void the state censorship. I cannot say for sure it's because it contains the "monk" word, but this would be my first guess...
They can access it through http://216.92.34.251/, though (this is an IP I gave them based on the one my browser use from France). Shouldn't an alternate address be set for that case? Or maybe one already exists, that I could send to the person? I know I could do it myself by setting a "mirror" subdomain on one of my domain names, but maybe ops here might want to know about that. And also, I am not sure the IP is not going to change anytime soon, etc.
Pair have investigated the recent outage and the site was hogged by Amazon AIbot by them keeping all connections to Apache open.
The IPs have now been blocked on the firewall and I will be far more aggressive now by blocking IP addresses of anything hitting the site in an undue fashion.
Hi. My recent posting titled "Passing argument by reference (for a scalar)" has an author Anonymous Monk which should be me, jmClifford. I am unsure of how this occurred ?? The responses are excellent. :-)
This weekend, i'm in the process of upgrading the server on which chatterbot runs to Ubuntu 24.04. Depending on how this goes, chatterbot might be unavailable for a few hours. This will also affect last hour of cb.
The process generally involves upgrading the OS as well as multiple local Perl installations an their respective slew of CPAN modules. (Different services on my server run on different users, each having their own Perl installation).
chatterbot now logs access times and errors whenever it accesses the Monastery anyway, see pm server stats. Useful to see if the monastery is having more technical issues than usual. (There might be a bug pertaining to actually logging the errors encountered, still working on it).
Thanks to chatterbot, chat has now all the tools needed to resolve any intellectual conflict 😉:
Command
What does it do
!coin
Flips a coin ("heads" or "tails")
!d6
Rolls a standard six sided die for those complicated multiple choice questions.
!d20
Rolls a 20 sided D&D die. Attack, defense, extra-complicated multiple choice forms, you name it.
!8ball
Simulated Magic 8 Ball. Can answer any yes/no question.
Answers to this commands include a fake ID, so chatterbot can post the same answer multiple times consecutively. For example, when multiple coin tosses are requested in short order in a "best out of three" solution. Just ignore the ID.
suggestion: Instead of a long list of links on the header of each page maybe just have a link to "page with cool stuff" that lists and has a bit of annotation about each of the links.
hate to bring this up gain ... this site is distressingly slow. you can't argue about that. besides my personal preferences people don't want to wait. something should be done.
In order to constructively use surplus votes, I've been going back through older Meditations. The "older entries" links stop at 300. Is there a good reason for that? I was keen to continue necro-reacting past 2019.
In the help page Display of Node Reputation, at the bottom it has links to check/uncheck "Show reputation spread" in User Settings, but these don't seem to work.
It seems they could be replaced with something like /?node_id=1072;setnodetension=on and /?node_id=1072;setnodetension=off as these work.
Normally, when the site redirects you to a 'default' page, it is The Monastery Gates.
If you'd rather have it go to a different page, visit your User Settings and enter the node ID in the 'Preferred Default Page' field.
Currently, this is only respected in the Log In page.
The plan is to have it respected in other places as well.
When someone is getting used to RATs they may put the legend at the top for easier reference. However, once they no longer need it they may want to move it to the bottom so that the node list isn't pushed down. When you do this it puts the legend above the "I've check all of these" button, but it would seem better if the legend was below "I've check all of these" so it's less likely need to scroll down and probably less distance to move the mouse to get to it.
