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in reply to Re: Welcoming New Users and Accepting Site Reviews
in thread Welcoming New Users and Accepting Site Reviews
What there is a need for is volunteer developers who might do something about the situation. The problem there is the code base is difficult.
I know many very old Web Projects that managed to keep running and not getting stuck. I personally know the Wordpress very well since more than 10 years ago.
They managed progressively updating their Engine Base Code to modern standards and still keep running.
That is the way you deal with updating / remaking big projects. You do it progressively. With some bigger and some smaller efforts.
One step to invite new volunteers would open up the Source Code on a GitHub repository.
As it is a common Praxis to many CPAN developments.
That way you can manage the project which an Issue Tracker and accept little code contributions from a broader audience.
- or Template::Toolkit https://github.com/abw/Template2
- or Mojolicious https://github.com/mojolicious
An attitude like I found at
https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=1223201
> But I can't find any answer to my concrete Question
> You dont need to know :)
Doesn't really make you a favor.
(Who are those who think nobody needs to know and this site does not need any help ?)
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Re^3: Welcoming New Users and Accepting Site Reviews
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Sep 29, 2018 at 15:40 UTC
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To be clear: you are right, the site could really use updates on several levels. That’s given. No one disputes it provided the core functionality does not change. That said–
You’re still a party crasher who knows nothing about the community or the site or its history and you’re accidentally off-putting because of it. It’s been awhile but the last time I looked at WordPress it was a code midden. A study in worst practices with serious security issues on and off and on again. It succeeds in spite of the mess and the lack of separation of concerns because it has a massive install base, there are hundreds and hundreds of developers, and it has a financial model. Perlmonks has two regular, very part-time devs, with a few more sometimes devs and few more fly-by devs who have commit bits but don’t contribute, like me, and no money. WordPress is also a poor example because—again, my opinion—the PerlMonks code base is not salvageable. Grafting progressive, modernizing changes onto certain kinds of projects only increases complexity and instability; and burns out volunteers.
I wrote a CMS/blog platform in Perl that covers most of the core functionality of WordPress. I did it in one month, alone. It’s been running a couple of sites for about 10 years. I’m a CPAN author. And I am a mediocre JAPH on the PerlMonks totem pole. tobyink has 250 packages on the CPAN alone.
So, you’re trying to school those who know Perl and programming extremely well; a high number of users are professional programmers; some are core contributors; inactive members represent just about all of the Perlsphere’s essential hackers; past and present. You’re talking down to everyone as if this were some kind of script kiddie pool: gIthub and issue tracking and TT2… I have patches in Template::Toolkit and CGI.pm among others and I didn’t dictate them. There is hardly a monk here who isn’t adept at github, perforce, mercurial, CVS, or SVN.
(Who are those who think nobody needs to know and this site does not need any help ?)
Me. Quite a few others. Need != want. I want updates. I want instant voting, WYSIWYG editing preview, some kind of tagging, reverse indexed fast search, more auto-listings, more auto-linking, etc. It’s desire, not need. I come here for Perl discussion and to answer Perl questions, not to bask in HTML5.
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Re^3: Welcoming New Users and Accepting Site Reviews
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Sep 29, 2018 at 14:29 UTC
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(Who are those who think nobody needs to know and this site does not need any help ?)
It was Anonymous Monk that said "You don't need to know" and you need to exercise judgement when evaluating responses from Anonymous Monk.
Sometimes he provides remarkable insights and, at the other extreme, he sometimes provides complete and utter garbage.
Often he provides something that is neither a "remarkable insight" nor "complete and utter garbage".
I think that, in the instance you've linked to, he was providing something between garbage and a joke. (There was a smiley, after all.)
The question of whether this site needs help or not is a curly one.
For me, after 12 years I've learnt to find my way around it pretty well - I therefore personally don't see a need for anything to change.
I always assumed that the drop-off in attendance here was due to the declining interest in perl, but if there's something about the layout or culture of the site that's deterring people from joining up then I'm all for fixing it if such is possible.
It's new attendees like you that would be most aware of these sorts of shortcomings. Old regular farts like me can only see that it's pretty much the same as always - which is something that we probably also take comfort in.
What, specifically, do you want to change ?
Cheers,
Rob | [reply] |
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Re^3: Welcoming New Users and Accepting Site Reviews
by LanX (Saint) on Sep 29, 2018 at 10:45 UTC
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> An attitude like I found at https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=1223201
Look... You don't even know how to link properly, but are giving us advice about the code base?
My advice, gain an overview about the functionalities here before talking about how to replace them.
TIP: Perlmonks has configurable CSS themes.
Showing us an improved "modern" theme might convince us that you are more than an over motivated "big mouth" who stirs problems starts ambitious projects and disappears after some weeks.
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Re^3: Welcoming New Users and Accepting Site Reviews
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 29, 2018 at 12:38 UTC
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Thank you for the Link at
https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=555609
Yes, I always supposed that PerlMonks were done by professionals in their free time.
Obviously the site was written for Web Programmers because it's comment markup is very hard to get right for someone who is not familiar with HTML markup.
But in difference to those other projects it did not progress visibly.
I put WordPress as an example because it is also very old but kept always progressing.
And because of its friendly welcoming attitude and its open source code it makes it easy to contribute little pieces. Even if somebody can not spare much time.
And I myself have already contributed a little improvement to them. Even though I'm still new there too ...
Why did I post my complain on here?
Nowadays PerlMonks is still the flagship project for the Perl Community.
https://www.perl.org/community.html
And it is the first impression that counts many times. And there is no second chance for the first impression.
Perhaps others turn just away without saying anything ...
I'm very sure they already do.
So having a nice userfriendly site makes Perl Programming attractive.
And having a google-friendly site will bring people to your site and represent it as an Authority for Perl Programming Questions.
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"And having a google-friendly site will bring people to your site and represent it as an Authority for Perl Programming Questions."
Posts to the site are indexed very quickly by Google, what makes you think the site is not "google-friendly"? What evidence do you have for this?
"Obviously the site was written for Web Programmers because it's comment markup is very hard to get right for someone who is not familiar with HTML markup."
Examples for the major things like code tags, as well as links which give many examples of how to do everything else are linked to each time you post. You can't have looked at them.
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> But in difference to those other projects it did not progress visibly.
Perlmonks is much more than the "visible parts".
But FWIW regarding visible style, it's possible to turn TobyInk's bootstrap style (see screen shot) into a regular theme by applying a dedicated "generalParent_container".
This wouldn't be the default theme, but a good start to develop one (it still has several issues, like breaking other JS code° and we need backwards compatibility for (browser-)static HTML)
IMHO this theme should include a hook such that everyone could inject his own JS code from his Display Settings - like it's possible to inject one's own CSS - to allow further evolution.
(PMdev's can neither create or fork code-nodes, they can only provide patches to existing nodes and hope the gods accept them. And they don't have access to all the code. To further complicate things they can't test patches in a sandbox.)
> Thank you for the Link at
https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=555609
Honestly I doubt you are really interested in the gory details of the monasteries engine, since you didn't care to figured out yet how to set a proper link.*
Otherwise I could link to some documentation ...
*) I have a nodelet hack which automatically turns text like https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=555609 into meaningful links like Can I get the PerlMonks source code?
°) there is a long traditional reluctance against complicating the code-base with JS. And PMDevs are Perl experts, not designers excelling in CSS. The solution would be to decouple these domains.
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Many feel as you do. It is not clear if big infrastructure changes would ever see the light of day here, if someone had enough initiative to even post something that people liked. That initiative would not be hard to take since there are plenty of scrapeable nodes, but few go that far.
Also Pair sponsors Perlmonks so nobody is stepping up to invest in the infrastructure they want.
Perlmonks has a winning formula, but you can too. If you build it, they will come. New site can link to here, they can link to there, probably would be mutually beneficial relationship. Almost guaranteed to succeed. Enough users have quit here that you would probably pick up at least 10-20 in the first month that just couldn't stand unanswered Perl questions laying around on the internet.
Sell some ads or perl books or camels or whatever, make some money, reinvest it and buy some new attractive content that the brightest Perl minds have to offer, attract some recruiters and sell them job listing, eventually culminating into a best selling autobiography about your success and fly in helicopters, get old and donate all your money to charity saving hundreds of thousands of lives.. It could happen.
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