Sorry, but Perl 6 is indeed on-topic at PerlMonks. The more off-topic (to the thread) items were the replies that got reaped (and also the resulting meta replies).
In my experience, I'm rather far down toward the "don't reap" end of the attitude scale within the PerlMonks community. I'm more in favor of responding to bad speech by countering it with more speech (as well as a healthy dose of just ignoring, especially for things that come close to being trolling). But I'm actually in favor of the several cases of reaping that I observed in this thread (I haven't checked that I've reviewed them all, so there might be some that I would object to).
I can see some justifications for labeling those replies as "trolling". I can even see some justifications for calling them "non-commercial spamming". But I also don't see them as perfectly fitting either of those labels. And I don't care much at all whether the abuse was done anonymously or not (vs. how several critics called that specific aspect out in their criticisms).
The best label I see for those is "abuse".
Now, I actually don't even think that "abuse" is a category that should be a sufficient justification for reaping at PerlMonks. I can see cases (different communities with different dynamics) where it could be very beneficial to have a policy of "censor abuse". More often, such a policy ends up being a mixed blessing. At PerlMonks, I think that most things that I would call "abuse" should be mostly studiously ignored and (rather rarely) countered (when someone finds an unusual level of eloquence that applies well to the specific case).
The reasons I was glad to see these reapings have more to do with the aspects that make a "spam" label somewhat appropriate. There has been a repeated pattern of nearly every node by raiph rather quickly getting not just one but a whole series of replies that each had almost nothing to do with his posting (beyond the tenuous: he was posting about some aspect of Perl 6 and each reply seems motivated by a negative emotional association with Perl 6 in general), was not a serious attempt at discourse, and was rude, often very rude.
I see extremely little up side to PerlMonks going the way of youtube and news-site comments where every single post that even mentions X (for a large and growing list of Xes) gets a predictable cascade of angry replies rehashing the same bullet points of "why X sucks" despite none of those bullet points having much of anything to do with the article being replied to.
It was bad enough when almost every single "some aspect of Perl 6" node at PerlMonks got the predictable cascade of earnest replies that still were just all rehashing the same few common reactions from a parade of different people, each of whom didn't seem that well informed about Perl 6. So the topics presented in each thread never got explored because each thread became mostly another rehash of whether "Perl" should even be in the name of Perl 6, or similar.
Then it switched to just low-effort, sarcastic nodes of a quality on par with youtube comments. Again, not reason for reaping in itself, IMO. But a repeated pattern of cascades of them, yeah, I fine with reaping those. Over and over again. Especially when they form an attempt to repeatedly "shout down" a specific member or a specific topic.
For those few who replied that they enjoy watching the abuse, I turn the advise each gave back to them: Go do that on a "your sites" (if you don't yet have your own "bitch about Perl 6" site, than I guess that's something you could devote some effort to). Or you can get plenty of watching abuse/suffering on TV.
Yes, you want Perl 6 to be renamed. You've said that. It isn't actually a useful, reasonable reply to every single thread that mentions Perl 6.
If the mere mention of Perl 6 causes a flood of negative emotions for one, a better response (not just for you) is to get better at ignoring mentions of Perl 6.
If one wants to actually try to get "Perl" removed from the name, then replying to a status update or release announcement is certainly extremely unlikely to be an effective route. Go take it to "their sites" (and work on eloquence, persuasion, understanding your target's motivations and concerns, etc.).
If one is unhappy with the pace of progress on Perl 6... ;)
