I have been finding having to insert paragraph breaks, posting to PerlMonks a mild nuisance for some time, but thought I'd check to see if it was an issue that had been addressed before and did a search, and found, as you point out, this old thread and many others, with many people emphasising in particular "the p thing". I post to dozens of forums which do not have this requirement, to manually insert paragraph breaks.

Back around the late 90's when the web was particularly volatile, with message boards, forums and social network sites comming and going, I got fed up with my "family" and friends on the internet who had developed real community, being hit by sudden forum closures, and having to relocate. It's not unlike a real city or community being hit with a major disaster that displaces the entire population.

So I'm not the most experienced Perl programmer in the world, But I have made a fairly in depth study of CGI programming, particularly as applied to online communities and message board forums.

I'm not trying to prove any point, or step on any toes or bruise any egos or lead an insurrection.

I was just interested in possibly contributing to trying to solve what appears to be a very long standing issue.

In my quest to ensure that I could rebuild an Internet community, struck by disaster, I discovered, I would need a thorough knowledge of CGI.

CGI.pm is a behemoth. I never did like it. Too bloated. I just wanted a script I could upload in an emergency, that did not have any dependencies. So I never used it in my own forum programs.

Part of the problem is that mobile device keyboards are not designed for coding, so things like angle brackets are a royal pain to access. But who isn't accessing the internet via a smartphone these days?

I do appreciate your solution. I tried to implement it, but only ended up messing up my home page. Access to all my threads, and all the widgets disappeared. I had to remove it. Don't know what I did wrong.

I'm not sure I'd consider that a viable solution for making PerlMonks easier to use for new people.

Personally, although I'm very experienced in HTML, and I don't mind using code, I just find it a nuisance to HAVE TO enter code continuously for every post, though the post may have nothing to do with code.

I don't consider a new line or return "code". Any more than spaces between words.

I don't know, but it appears the problem may reside in CGI.pm.

If nobody has access to the server to do a minor tweak to any modules then Oh well.

I have no idea where this forum resides. I just know, if I had access to the server, I think addressing this would be my top priority as it renders the forum virtually unusable, which is something I would not want for any forum I was responsible for.

Tom