Inevitably some of us feel we have to maintain a presence in the void tyo keep in touch while others flatly refuse to go there.

That's a depressing viewpoint. This place still sees a continuous influx of new people; but I suspect that many of them do not hang around very long.

We like it where we are, unencumbered by advertising, pictures of kittens or the banalities of pre-pubescent celebrities.

I concur with that opinion. (I haven't change in that since I wrote; Hope that helps -- 1 year on. a long time ago.) And very few here I think would advocate moving far towards that kind of environment.

But informally acknowledging that "perl programming" interfaces with and cuts across a wide variety of other programming fields and technologies by explicitly allowing questions and discussions that aren't necessarily just Perl; or even Perl at all at their core -- as by the addition/renaming of an existing section to an Off-Topic section -- doesn't seem to me to be either inviting that kind of change; nor beyond the pail for the vast majority of the regular respondents here.

Whether it alone would be enough to revive -- or even just stave off further decline -- is debatable till the cows come home; but at the very least, it would do no harm.

And if that happened; perhaps the single greatest contribution it would make to this place is confirming that change is possible!

As others have said, most of the best questions have already been asked and answered.

Sorry, but I just don't accept that.

This industry is still evolving faster than any other in history; and faster than any individual can ever hope to keep pace with.

For example, in the last month or so, I have personally had to completely re-access the break point ratio between cpu and IO at which multi-threading can be beneficial. All thanks to the order of magnitude improvement in throughput performance of PCIe connected SSDs.

And generally, almost no one knows how to use cloud computing properly; nor how Perl fits in (out) there -- if at all.

I could mention a dozen other areas where things are changing fast; but many of them are beyond my fields of expertise. Eg. Amazon AWS Lambda.

As I said: faster than any individual can hope to keep pace with; but -- were it not verboten; either explicitly or implicitly -- collectively, we could at least be able to stay aware of the possibilities.

An OT section, where such possibilities could be freely and openly discussed, could inject new life into this place; without it descending into another twitbook we'll-sell-your-soul-in-return-for-making-you-feel-loved-by-a-zillion-strangers-you'll-never-meet-and-would-hate-if-you-did site.

I don't accept that all the questions have been asked; or that all the answers supplied to those that have are still correct or will remain so for more than a year or two.

And I don't accept that the guidelines and rules that were considered applicable and relevant to this place when it was founded; remain so today.

The only things preventing this place changing is hysteresis; and blind devotion to a rose colored past. And a lack of imagination.

I think the desire is here; it is just regularly beaten into submission by statement: "This place is not a democracy"; which is just another way of saying: my ball, my rules.