There are a lot of things on here I don't like either, but at least people are (were?) working on a NNTP gateway, IIRC, so that's a start. You mention one of the most horrible things that happened to mankind after Mao though: phpBB... but that's probably just too 1337 for me...OMG LOL ROFLMAO! {image}{image}{image}{bold large colored font crap}{image}{image}

Yes, there are quite a few things that I don't like about this place too, but either I got used to it, or I don't care about it too much to overcome my perpetual state of laziness and actually write a patch for it.

A threaded setup is vital for Perlmonks, IMHO. Discussions usually fly from left to right here. I don't have time to check this place every 10 seconds, so -with my bad memory- I need to see the structure, and I fear a lot of monks are like me in that way.

phpBB (yeah, as if we'd use a PHP solution) is bad in another way. It gives out a big list with all its members, including their email addresses (although I think at least they don't enable that "feature" by default anymore). WWW::Mechanize would love that though ...

Last but not least: since you can alter your CSS stylesheet, you can change it as much as you'd like. So, here's a challenge for you: create a stylesheet (Greasemonkey script for all I care) that transforms Perlmonks into a phpBB board! Would be fun to work on, and I'd like to see the result!