Maybe I am old enough that I remember the 60's too well, despite the adminition that if you can remember the 60's you weren't really there.

PM has a feel of community about it. We all have a common interest, some have a common cause, we certainly have a social commonality about us when you read the CB for any length of time. OK, thats too 'touchy feely' for you, no problem, I can understand that. I use the trerm 'community' becuase as soon as I became familiar with the monastery I found it a very comfortable place to be. Why? Because I am not surrounded by fourteen year old script-kiddy apostles for the God of PHP. Call me agist and elitist if you want! But many other places I find that the inhabitants expect as soon as you are talking CGI or Web Services that you are talking PHP.

To be honest, I don't find the monastery at all pompous. If you have a genuine and well researched question you will get a darned good answer here, something which sadly cannot be said of Usenet. And to be honest I can't remember when I started using Usenet, but it would have to be at latest th early 80's. The last thing I think I wouild wish to see is the Monastery become anything like the Usenet of today.

As for the slow interface, well how could anyone but agree!

As for slashdot, well, I hope they enjoy it over there. I sure as heck don't. Yet my experience here has been very positive.

jdtoronto

PS: Gee, you made me think back there. When did USENET start? Late 70's would be my recollection. I remember meeting Vint Cerf at a conference at the Univeristy of Sussex in 1973, our connection to ARPANET in those days was via University College in London if I recall. The next big thing I remember must have been the early 80's when there was a huge debate over renaming USENET groups. The Europeans didn't want to pay for the bandwidth to being the 'flaming groups' to Europe! What brave days they were.

...jd

1979 is the commonly stated year of Usenet's creation. Like everything though, it was an evolution, so it all depends on what you mean by "created."

To be honest, I don't find the monastery at all pompous. If you have a genuine and well researched question you will get a darned good answer here, something which sadly cannot be said of Usenet.

That I certainly don't agree with. I find questions on comp.lang.perl.misc answered faster and more to the point than on perlmonks. People here tend to be more verbose, and there are a lot of posts that don't really answer the question.

Because I am not surrounded by fourteen year old script-kiddy apostles for the God of PHP.

Maybe you aren't, but there are certainly days I do feel that perlmonks is filled with them.

Abigail

Nice troll, but I'm confused - what are you trying to accomplish?

You speak very highly of Usenet and clpm and bash Perlmonks as shown above. You have also suggested switching Perlmonks to a Usenet-like interface, which begs the question, why not just make it another newsgroup? But why have a separate newsgroup for Perlmonks? What purpose over clpm would that serve? Apparently none, so maybe you just want to get rid of Perlmonks? If that was the case, why would you have posted many helpful replies, adding to the good reputation of the site?

So I'm confused. Could you please explain your position and what you're trying to accomplish? Thanks.

Oh, please. Thank god, nowhere else.

Too bad, there shall be many more.

To tell you a secret, a lot of Perl people absolutely hate PM because of this so-called "PM community"

And a lot of people who read perlmonks absolutely despise these "Perl people" because of their blatant pretentiousness and elistism. Not to mention a great deal of them hardly know anything about Perl or programming for that matter. They often don't frequent discussions because their afraid to show their ignorance.

At least the majority of people that frequent perlmonks are trying to extend their knowledge. I'm tired of these usenet relics coming along and dumping on everything that tries to be something more. Usenet is an obsolete cesspool. Insulting people for trying to create something better doesn't speak well of you.

To extend Randal's metaphor, your actions are like walking into a movie theatre, constantly bitching about how much movies suck and how 1950's TV was so much better, then saying "I only come here because I like the moving pictures."

Your posts have helped me out of a coding jam or two. No matter what you think of the community, or the fact that some people here, like anywhere, put on airs, I'm certainly glad I found your posts here.

I like it here. I think PM is one of the few web forums that doesn't fall into this category.

How long will it take before this is in the worst nodes of the week?

I rather think that the node referred to was the node Abigail just wrote - since Abigail knows what people do to somewhat abruptly presented opinions ;-)

Personally I find usenet's signal/noise much worse than perlmonks - to-mah-to / to-may-to.

I know what he was referring to.. WRT Usenet, I'll let this quote speak for me:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea — massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
— Gene Spafford

Makeshifts last the longest.