I’m looking at the Best Nodes page. Sections for Best Nodes of the Day, Month, and Year have 10, 10, and 20 entries, respectively, as expected. But Best Nodes of the Week shows only 6 entries, numbered 5 to 10. Looks like something has gone wrong somewhere.

Thanks for looking,

Just thought you would like to know that the last hour of cb has not updated since Aug 05, 2020 at 12:55 EDT.

Reading Re^10: XS.c: loadable library and perl binaries are mismatched (got handshake key 0xc100000, needed 0xc180000) I was encouraged to confirm what rgren925 reported. I constructed a reply with about 120kB in it and used the Preview button to check it. All of it was rendered and there was no warning (that I could see) that it was over the size limit for posting. When it was subsequently submitted it still rendered fine and it was only on a further navigation to the same node that it did truncate to ~64kB as I expected.

This is not great from a UX perspective. The preview should either warn about the size or truncate it like the final submission would do or (ideally IMHO) both. The full text could still be retained in the textarea for ease of editing.

Davorg has posted a piece on LinkedIn (sorry, don't know how to link to it!) saying "Almost 7,800 unanswered 'perl' questions on StackOverflow. Can you help to answer some of them?" and giving the link https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/perl?tab=Unanswered. I am not surprised, as I have never found SO to be a helpful community. If we wish to drive Perl traffic to this site - I assume we do - might it be worth posting answers here & putting a link to the relevant node on SO?

Regards,

John Davies

Hello everyone. Is it possible to unparent tangents in threads? In the conversation of Expression form of map or grep, I answered a question as to why I cared about the number of lines. I replied here, and that created a tangent. Is it possible to unparent my reply and its replies into a new thread, maybe titled "I do not like scrolling" or something? It would be to keep the focus on the map/grep topic and let the new topic be its own thread.

In my mind, tangents could confuse some newer users.

I know this may be a bad thought or too much of a bother, but I would like to know. Please?

My last note is a thought, would it be to remove the unnecessary clicks in our "Donate" link above, and just link from here to https://donate.perlfoundation.org/donate.html. Idk if Dan is on here, but that page should probably get a face lift so that it has some of the info that's on https://donate.perlfoundation.org and may be more suitable for direct linking.

minor update, s/what's/the info that's/.

The node 11118252 has a "special" link that contains a vertical bar (encoded as %7C). This link has been constructed by specifying the full href, as choroba told me in a private message. As the vertical bar cannot be used directly in a link at the monastery as it separates the location from the displayed text, it must be encoded in some way. Trying to use the path IO::Uncompress::Gunzip#Transparent-=>-0%7C1 with some shortcut schemas gives interesting results:

[metamod://IO::Uncompress::Gunzip#Transparent-=>-0%7C1] -> https://metacpan.org/pod/IO%3A%3AUncompress%3A%3AGunzip%23Transparent-%3D%3E-0%257C1
points to nowhere (404)

[doc://IO::Uncompress::Gunzip#Transparent-=>-0%7C1] -> http://perldoc.perl.org/IO/Uncompress/Gunzip.html#Transparent-%3D%3E-0%257C1
links to the page, but not to the specified section

[mod://IO::Uncompress::Gunzip#Transparent-=>-0%7C1] -> http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?IO%3A%3AUncompress%3A%3AGunzip%23Transparent-%3D%3E-0%257C1
links to the specified section

<EDIT> metacpan.org and search.cpan.org work just fine, when accessed with the original path component "as is". The perdoc.perl.org example is misleading, as there are no anchors within the page. </EDIT>

All the generated links (except the full href) have one thing in common: The percent sign becomes encoded as %25. It depends on the target side if this will be interpreted in a useful way. I didn't find any documentation on how to include a hex encoded value in a link. Obviously it is handled different in a full href. Is this a bug or is it a feature? If it's a feature, then another feature might be missing: including hex codes in a path.

Solution: "Enforce proper nesting of HTML" in Display Settings. D'oh!

The node 11115734 contains an unclosed <i> in the "EDIT" at the top. However, the HTML for this node differs depending on whether I am logged in vs. logged out. When logged in, it's

<p>
<b>EDIT:</b>
<br />
I <strike>use</strike> <i>used</i> bareword filehandles.
<i>In the course of this discussion I was convinced not to do so.<i>
</i></i></p>
[download]

But when logged out, it's

<p>
<b>EDIT:</b>
<br />
I <strike>use</strike> <i>used</i> bareword filehandles.
<i>In the course of this discussion I was convinced not to do so.<i>
</p>
[download]

What's going on? Of course the "fix" is to correct the unclosed <i>, but I'm surprised at the rendering difference.

After my Raspberry Pi stuff I did for a couple of years, I've migrated away from SBC and now focus primarily on micro controllers to perform actions I need done.

I haven't had the 'need' for Perl in some time. Realistically, I'm only checking PerlMonks because it's a habit. I also still use Perl for quick one-off basic math and localized problems.

Other than that, being an ardent Perl user for a couple of decades, I'm finding my desire waning quite quickly. I don't really have the excitement I once held for Perl, nor is the community the same as it was years ago.

I am uncertain as to the future I have with Perl. I know I love Perl to death, but death does not sustain future generations.

I'm starting to think that Perl has been fractured to the point that it's been bypassed, and unless someone comes up with some magical cure to phase in some niche for it, maybe we need to retire.

Flustered and aggrieved I am as we all are, and even though I make money because of Perl, Perl might not be the best recommendation going forward.

As always, opinions welcome.

In "Re^4: one liner error" I see:

Reputation: -12 (+-2 -10)

The "+-2" seemed very strange and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen that in the past. I reloaded that page a couple of times but the "+-2" persisted.

I checked another from today's Worst Nodes. In "Re^2: delete single user" I see:

Reputation: -12 (+0 -12)

That looks normal. Any ideas on that first one with "+-2"?

This question was prompted by the following node: json no reload

Its author has repeatedly made low quality posts with an obvious lack of ability or intent to learn anything, expecting us to give him ready-to-use solutions to help him in his nefarious endavors. To put it bluntly, the poster is likely a scammer or script kiddie, except he keeps tripping up in his own shoelaces and he is too retarded to notice even that.

What is the right thing to do with posts like this, given that replying to them is at best a waste of time, but at worst might lead to other, innocent people being hurt?

1. ignore completely
2. delete and ban
3. try to educate the poster
4. give a malicious answer that hurts the scammer if he is dumb enough to blindly run code from the internet
5. report to the authorities

Ignoring or deleting seems like avoiding responsibility, like saying "it's not my problem".

Educating doesn't seem to work - now, nor in general.

As for giving a fake answer, I've once read a chatlog where an angry and overconfident kid wanted to hack his neighbor's wi-fi, and someone convinced him to run yes I want to enable wireless hacking > /dev/sda as root on his (or as it turned out, his father's) computer - which is both evil and hilarious. In any case, this is a dangerous option.

Reporting makes me feel like a snitch - but at the same time, if there is evidence for a crime, I (we) have a moral or even legal obligation to report it.

Over the past week or so I have noticed very occasionally that a page or an asset has not rendered in response to a request. choroba has also mentioned in the CB seeing this or something similar. Just now this has happened fortuitously while I had the network console running in my browser and it reports these problems:

A 500 response when attempting to retrieve https://www.perlmonks.org/css/common.css from the server at 209.197.123.153 at 11:16:54 GMT (Response header timestamp).

A 500 response when attempting to retrieve https://www.perlmonks.org/?node=list replies toggle javascript from the same server at the same time.

The 2 assets were then immediately re-requested by the browser and successfully served by that same server with the same timestamps.

I hope that this helps in tracking down the problem.

I was wondering if <details> with <summary> could be added as acceptable html here in PerlMonks. Those tags could be used when code or data examples are more than 10 or so lines. <readmore> is great for keeping long batches of code or data from the main list of posts, however, long batches of code might do well if kept in a <details> tag where the code or data can be hidden to keep page lengths from being over long upon initial load. So what do you all think?