This section is only for discussing issues pertaining to the PerlMonks web site itself.
For example, asking about how things work, or offering ideas on how the site could be made better.
Whenever I browse Selected Best Nodes, I notice that I miss the create date that is included in "Super Search" results, "Nodes You Wrote", etc. Given that Selected Best Nodes may return postings that may be two decades old, the create date gives some context for the postings.
Effective today, the section of PerlMonks known as "Categorized Questions and Answers" is no longer in service.
The section page is a tombstone. It is no longer possible to post Categorized Questions or Answers.
It is also not possible to search such posts via Super Search. It wouldn't be useful anyway, because all
of the posts which were Categorized Questions have been converted into SOPW posts.
Likewise, all posts which were Categorized Answers have been converted into replies to those SOPW posts.
In each case, the name of the CatQA 'section' in which the Question was places has been added to SOPW post as a keyword.
The intent of the CatQA section will, going forward, be fulfilled by a new system, whereby "good" questions (in SOPW)
and their "best" answers will be given a special flag, as well as relevant keywords.
Some documentation and linkage changes remain to be made. If you see any, feel free to sent a msg to SiteDocClan, pmdev, or gods, depending.
When I load the main page, there is a character encoding issue:
Image
Interestingly, it appears normal when I open the link or when I log in.
Firefox also displays this warning on the development tools panel:
"The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol."
Re^2: glob an array? scolded Marshall for a slapdash response made in 2018 ... at least Marshall is still here and responded promptly: "Geez! I have no idea exactly what I was thinking 2 years ago ...". :)
It feels especially eerie when a necroposter responds to a monk
who's not been sighted for so many years that he may well have passed on to become a necromonk.
I get the feeling that necroposts have been on the rise here lately - interested to hear theories why.
Though I found many previous discussions of anonymous posting (see "Previous Anonymous Monk Discussions" section below),
I couldn't find any previous discussions of necroposting. Hence this node.
Though my personal opinion is that necroposts are beneficial,
I'm interested to learn how other monks feel about them
and how they might be improved.
Why I Like Necroposts
As a serious code-golfer for many years I watched in dismay as ... the perl fwp and golf mailing lists died
... the 2002 TPR golf series lasted just one season ... Terje's minigolf site came and went ... as did the kernelpanic.pl
Polish golf site, codegolf.com, phpgolf.org, and many more ... while Perl Monks lives on and on and on!!!
The upside is that PM's extreme longevity, combined with its low barrier to entry for non monks
to post, has resulted in many invaluable nuggets posted by non-Perl-monk code golf experts.
Without PM's low barrier to entry, many of this priceless golfing lore
would have been lost for all time.
While most of these responses were made anonymously (signed with the name of the poster),
I was pleased to see the greatest code golfer I know of, primo,
going to the bother of creating a PM account, solely to respond to PM code golf threads.
As a final example of valuable necroposting, I've been grateful to jdporter for necroposting
historically priceless nuggets of Perl Monks history to The First Ten Perl Monks (2014):
I suspect some of the recent necroposts (especially the anonymous ones) were made accidentally
(i.e. without the poster being aware they were responding to a thread that was over 10 years old)
... and so wonder if it would be good to provide some sort of warning that you are responding to a really old thread.
Some sort of visual indicator decorating the necropost response itself may further be worth considering,
so that folks viewing recent nodes can easily spot the necroposts.
Re: Challenge: Ricochet Robots was an anonymous post that was recently edited (emptied) with no janitation history. But Anonymous Monk cannot edit his own posts. After some back and forth in the CB, the best guess is that the post ran afoul of anti-spam AM-posts-with-links auto-cleaning. Which is fine... but it would be nice to be sure.
More importantly than this specific instance: should there be some sort of indication on such posts, whether in the janitation history or in the body of the emptied post, to indicate that it was auto-cleaned for potential spam? This would give people a chance to weigh in with a consideration-to-edit/restore: "no, I saw the content and followed the link before it was purged: it was a link to a A* algorithm implementation of this problem in another language, which doesn't seem like spam given the conversation". (It's obviously been fixed in this case, but I'm using my reaction to this case to explain the general idea)
Recently, the anonymous account is mostly one infamous user, one detractor who seems to think that every anonymous post (other than his) are by that infamous, and an increasingly-rare useful post.
I understand the desire for an anonymous account -- it lowers the barrier of entry for one-off questions, and it probably helps with GPDR.
But often, especially in the last year or so, it seems to me to be more trouble than it is worth. It allows infamous monks to hide behind a cloak that sometimes (but not always) masks who they are and how dangerous their "advice" is. But it also allows angry monks to carry out vendettas against the infamous monks any time there's a non-zero probability that an anonymous post might be from that infamous monk. And, on those rare occasions when the AM isn't one of those two, it makes it hard to follow questions, "no, I'm not that AM, I am a different one, the one from id://...."
Most forums I've visited don't allow any anonymous posts. Do the negatives here outweigh the positives? And if TPTB don't want to disable AM, could we at least add a non-identifying identifier to AM posts?
Something I've thought of before, I finally suggested in CB after today's anonymous-edit, and am now reiterating here: I would suggest a one-way hash on the IP address -- so it wouldn't tell us who or where the person is, but it would say "this is likely the same AM as from that other post". For the useful AM conversation, it would help other readers follow which AM said what; and for the infamous and his detractor(s), it would make it easier to confirm or deny whether it is likely the same monk or not. Both seem like "wins" to me. I understand that IP addresses can change or be behind big corporate blocks, so it's not a foolproof identifier in either direction (same IP might feasibly be used by good AM and bad AM, or a single AM's IP might change between posts) ... but it might help some. As long as the particular hash is not also applied to logged-in posts, I wouldn't think it would run afoul of GPDR (but, IANAL, so take it for what it's not worth).
Anyway, just an idea I've had, and since there was some support in CB, I finally decided to suggest it officially.
I was just about to post a new SoPW item and noted that
I needed to scroll through lots of old posts.
On commenting on that here (i.e. this PM post), I sill needed to wade through many posts to get to "Post new ...".
My suggestion is that new SoPW, and all other new PM posts, are presented at the top of the list.
Obviously, having been here for over a decade, I'm quite familar with the status quo.
Those, who are newer to the monastery, may well get disoriented negotiating the cloisters:
let's make it easier for them.
Update:
Rewrote title (before any respones) to make intent clearer.
When I use the Random Node feature, more often than not I arrive at a node which I don't have privileges to view. Whilst this is not a big issue, I suspect it comes from people in pmdev having access to all these prohibited nodes and not seeing the issue.
Either I'm rather unlucky with the random nodes I get served or there are a lot of prohibited nodes in the Monastery.
I've noticed an increasing number of spam users over the past few weeks: new accounts which don't post any nodes but put a link on their home node to their external site for SEO benefit. I wonder if a threshold for this facility should not be put in place such that it is unavailable to initiates? Either disallowing links in the Bio or just disallowing the Bio entirely would work.
Or maybe the spam links aren't considered that much of an issue, I don't know. Any thoughts?
