Regarding why you don't see your posts after submitting them: around here, we call it the 'approval' process. Basically, after you submit your post, one user (yep, it only takes one user, besides yourself) must say 'yes, this post is worthy of being viewed by everyone who might be interested and deserves to be given some attention by the rest of the readers of the site'.

So it might take between 10 seconds and a couple of hours for your post to be approved. If you still don't see the post after several hours, it may be because your fellow monks think the post was not perl-related or that you didn't put any thought or effort into solving your own problem. We like to see code examples that show you've attempted to tackle the problem yourself. If you just need something done and you don't want to do any work, don't think that others will do your work for you. If that's what you're looking for, look for somebody who will work for money :)

Another reason you might not be able to see your post is that it HAS been approved, but others thought your post would be better presented under another section on the site. So if you post to Seekers of Perl Wisdom, but your post is a question about the site and not about Perl, it might have been moved to Perl Monks Discussion. Check out all the sections to see if it's hanging around. :)

Also, if you really want to see your post (as well as those posted by others) right away without waiting for them to be approved, look under User Settings, and check the checkbox that says 'Show Unmoderated Content', located under the 'Miscellaneous' section. This will place non-approved nodes at the top of the message list, so that you can browse them without scrolling to the very bottom of the page, where unmoderated/unapproved nodes hang around.

I don't know if it's just not in real time, or if the server is just terribly slow, or what.

Blasphemy! Nothing is wrong with Perl Monks :P Seriously though, there haven't been terrible problems regarding the cached documents. As soon as more content is discovered, the cached page is updated. The only area that used to (may still?) be a little out of sync was the front page of the site. I think so anyhow.

And to answer the question you asked in paragraph 3, the posts are sorted according to original posting date. If a reply is written for a certain thread, the post is not replaced at the top of the list. This just keeps everything organized in a simple manner. In this way, threads don't keep jumping around. Now, if you're wondering how to keep up with which threads are well-discussed topics, there is one great way: and it has this very purpose in mind.

It is called Newest Nodes. Newest Nodes is wonderful. Its default behaviour is to show you the threads and nodes that have been posted/created since the last time you checked the list. Once you've read all the nodes you are interested in, you simply click the "I've checked all these" button at the bottom of that page. You'll then have an empty list, and any newly created threads will be put on this list.

This is also the feature that makes starting another thread on the exact same problem/question/topic very annoying. If anybody who read the original post is interested in that particular post, they will watch Newest Nodes for replies to that post... therefore there is no need to start another thread. Even if the original thread is not anywhere near the top of the list, replies will still be found and read by those who use the useful Newest Nodes. So even if you post a reply to a thread posted in the year 2000, a link to the reply will be added to Newest Nodes.

Just my $30.02

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eval reverse@{[lreP
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