What if someone supplied a general topics board separately, which did not allow Perl discussions except tangentially, that was somehow open specifically to the members of Perlmonks (and perhaps their non-PM friends by invitation)?

I'm picturing another web site, running perhaps Everything or something similar. Anything strictly Perl related could be referred back over to PM. It wouldn't have to be strictly Perlmonks affiliated, and would be operated by another group of monks.

I'm in a position to host the site at nominal expense so long as the traffic doesn't get too high. Since we're talking about most nodes going away, the storage wouldn't be much of an issue, either.

My concern about such a site is that it takes eyeballs away from Perlmonks, but so far perlmonk.org and such haven't done any harm of which I'm aware. Of course, with comp.lang.perl.m* newsgroups, use.perl.org, and Perlmonks, some would say we're already spread too thin. It'd help keep the SNR ratio and on-topic/off-topic ratio here low, but it could possibly drain away things close enough to on-topic here that PM would be the poorer for not having those nodes.

I came to Perlmonks because someone (japhy?) on comp.lang.perl.misc mentioned how helpful and community-oriented the site was. I stayed because the voting system took killfile management out of the hands of myself and my news reader, because PM is more reliable for storing nodes than most NNTP servers, because getting many ISPs to understand NNTP is better than Google Groups is more difficult by the year, and because my last read nodes info is stored at PM instead of in a local reader on one of my machines.

With so many strengths of Perlmonks and such a great group of people as users, I'd be happy to see a bulletin-board style adjunct to it that shares a userbase if it doesn't dilute the nodes here.

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