My understanding is that vroom is busy. He is maintaining the site and adding various things behind the scenes to smooth things out overall (for instance he has made it possible to address various things with editors, he has done some things about bots, etc). However I don't think he has time for massive development. And donations are not coming in fast enough to pay for him to be a full time employee.

Given that I think it is more than slightly unfair for people to sit around tapping their toes asking when everything is going to be done already. Nor do I want to see features added which encourage this attitude. Are you paying the bills? No? Then you are a guest, please act that way. Even though I have donated some, I am likewise a guest. Unlike with open source software, the cost of running this site is centralized, not distributed.

So what can we do to improve that?

The obvious answer is that everyone can donate money so vroom can work full-time on the site. The offering plate is ready. Go to it! Hasn't really worked yet, but if you ask early and often...

Another idea is to distribute development. I don't know how other people feel, but I am strongly against having a large group of people added with any sort of administrative privileges. Or even local logins. OTOH I think it would be useful if, like happened with Slashdot and slashcode, it was easy to set up your own PerlMonks-like site. To some extent this is possible, the Everything code-base is available. But PerlMonks has diverged from that base. How much? I don't know. I am a user here, not a developer. Nor have I had time to study E2. But I know it diverged a while ago.

However were I to ask for any significant development, the development that I would like to see is this. I would like to see PerlMonks resynchronized as much as is feasible with E2, and then see a release of enough of the PerlMonks base and whatever else may be required so that anyone who wants to can download it, set up a working private version of PerlMonks, add a useful feature, export that feature, and others can copy it. I don't know how hard it is. I would guess not easy because much of the site is stored as data in a database...

I would be willing to pledge some money for that...though not much time. In fact when I see vroom tonight I will ask how doable that is...

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