How can I help? (aka YAMMP)

[FoxtrotUniform]

That expands to Yet Another Monastery Milestone Post.

Earlier today, I noticed that I've been a Perl Monk for pretty much exactly a year now. (This is also my 256th post; I've noticed other people making a big deal out of posts at round numbers; what I can't figure out is why they pick round numbers in base ten. Perhaps they're just not quite as geeky as I am.) Somewhat to my surprise, I've become a Saint, and I've certainly benefitted greatly from the time I've spent here. I've learned new idioms, better coding practices (probably the most important thing you've had to teach me was the pervasive use of strict.pm and -w), enjoyed some fiendishly obfuscated code (I don't have much of a talent for it myself, but I love trying to decipher others' obfus), and most importantly found a place in a community of helpful, well-informed, and frequently brilliant Perl programmers.

There's just one problem: I don't feel that I've given enough back.

I don't tend to troll through Seekers of Perl Wisdom and answer the kind of run-of-the-mill questions that brought <assumption type="gratuitous">most </assumption> of us here. I don't have merlyn's or Ovid's (or japhy's or ...) patience in the face of an infinite number of "how do I build a regex to parse XML?" or "how do I parse CGI parameters without using a module?" or "(etc)" questions. I'm addicted to problems just beyond my reach... and until now I always thought of that as a virtue. I don't answer many Q&As; in fact, most of my nodes are replies to Meditations.

I'm not an editor. I'm not a pmdevil -- I'm vaguely interested in the Everything engine, but don't really have much of a reason to get to know it, and as I understand Perl Monks runs on a rather heavily modified Everything codebase. About my only regular contributions to the smooth daily running of the site are regular visits to Nodes to Consider.

I'm looking for ideas, and historically this is a pretty good place to find them.

How can I help?

And in genuine thanks that Perl Monks hasn't gone down the drain like Slashdot: "256th Post!"

--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq

[PodMaster]

I'm not a pmdevil -- I'm vaguely interested in the Everything engine, but don't really have much of a reason to get to know it, and as I understand Perl Monks runs on a rather heavily modified Everything codebase. About my only regular contributions to the smooth daily running of the site are regular visits to Nodes to Consider.

The e2 engine is not heavily modified at all. See that's the beauty of e2, the engine doesn't change (well it does, but it's transparent to the everyday e2 developer), you just tackle on little bits of code (perl and html) here and there to add new features.

Here is an example, a little chunk from the approval nodelet

[%
  use Everything::Experience;

  my $isGod= isGod($USER);
  return   unless  $isGod  ||  getLevel($USER) > 5;

  my $SETTING = getVars( getNode('approval nodelet settings','setting'
+) );
  my $type = $NODE->{type}{title};

  my %types;
  {
    my @types = split /,/, $SETTING->{types};
    @types{@types} = (1) x @types;
  }

  return unless $types{$type} or grep $_ eq $type,
    qw/modulereview bookreview note sourcecode snippet perltutorial pe
+rlnews/;

  my $nid = getId($NODE);

Looks interesting doesn't it. Interested?

update:
zdog informs me that "There is no such thing as an e2 engine. It's called Everything or ebase. E2 is just another site running on it like PM. And secondly, the 0.8 engine that PM runs on is quite heavily modified. The interface is the same but there are changes."

That's all correct ofcourse, and I do have a tendency to refer to the everything engine as e2, cause after all, e2 is everything2, but nonetheless, from the perspective of a pmdever, it doesn't matter one bit (if you're a god it might, but its not likely you'll become one anytime soon ;)

[VSarkiss]

Piece o' cake: Contribute! ;-)

[zdog]

Yeah, give money. But if you want to contribute more along the lines of "time and talent," I think that the more important question is: how do *you* want to contribute?

You said that answering questions in SOPW isn't really your thing, well ... what is your thing? Do you want to be an editor? do you want to join pmdev? do you want to help out with Everything?

You said that you help out with moderation daily. Cool. Is that something that you're interested in? or would you rather do some coding?

It's great that you want to help out, but it'd be even better if you could give us some of your interests first to help us come up with suggestions.

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | [e-mail]