You probably right, the decline seems an evident curve here, the worst part (for me) is not the number of nodes but the lesser adherence with the reality. I try to squeeze my en-BAD to explain what i mean: while ten years ago posts on Perlmonks reflected the state of the Perl art and Perl itself was probably the best (if not only) tool to have many jobs done, now posts reflect more the particular needs of participants when outside of the monastery (even good) things happend and now Perl itself is loosing positions respect other languages.

The CGI.pm example is prototypical from this point of view. It was the best around in the early 2000s, many posts at Perlmonks were about CGI and related, many monks were very professional on CGI if not author of some relevant module. Now we incredibly are in 2015. In web development a century has passed: barbaric invasion of PHP hordes, counterattack of .Net loyalists, occupation of visionary Javaists, proliferation of different devices used to browse, increased bandwitdh for everyone...
Finally the Perl world reacted somehow producing tools and abstract views of the web: Catalyst, Mojo, Dancer and finally Plack and PSGI.
So good things happened but outside of Perlmonks, only tangentially these things affected posts in Perlmonks, almost no protagonist of such projects are monks or are here on regular basis.

Now, in respect to my presence here and the weight of my thoughts, i'm only a lazy sysadmin with the passion of Perl, as Perl is my only sane interaction with the machine. I'm not an expert in any IT field nor a scientist. I'm just curious and if I have a Perl idea i try it. But i just have no time to learn other languages even if i know could be interesting. So i'll be a programmer until some machine can run my Perl code. Perlmonks is my only online community: no other tech forums, no socials. So I can be limited but, as you can understand, i'm very interested in the progress of Perl and in the wealthiness of Perlmonks.

That said i'm definitively for first option: do something, new blood, retain high experienced (in real life) monks.

I'm not so sure that the way is to modify the form of the monstery. Or well, the site can also be improved as recently discussed adding an OffTopic section, but changing the form, in my humble opinion, will be not resolutive. More important is the content. We lack a lot in some state of the art perl techniques.

New blood can be summoned also using the actual form of the monastery. My proposal: we can start some Meditation aimed to collect the contribution of monks with real experience. Materials from these Meditations must then be converted in new Tutorials to be posted in the apposite section. Content in this meditations can (or even must) be off topic too, because the world is not only Perl. These meditation can start with a proposal of the matter and a summary to be modified and filled by monks contributions in the thread.

I imagined this for 'Perl and the Web - state of the art 2015' topic. This can also contain a lot off topic content: HTTP basics, jquery, css, deploying strategies, Apache tricks. Here around are many (also low level) monks with a lot of practice in web development. The result can be a first class material that for sure will attract here new blood. many different topics are obviously possible: big data, multithread applications, Perl for new devices, genetic analysis..
For such purpose we can also try to invite external peoples or retired monks to add their contribute.

here are my words

L*
Update: fixed some typos, thanks to chacham!

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