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in reply to Perl Monks monastery vs the Vatican
It doesn't make sense to me to have a "share" button on nodes in general.
1) The anonymous color scheme is lame, so sending new people here who aren't logged in causes headaches. This could be fixed, but it's there to be a bit irritating so new people register.
2) Liking a site on social media is pretty lame, unless it's addressing a specific need at a specific time to specific people. Otherwise it looks like marketing, and we only need a smidge, and we get most of that from Google and word of mouth, I think.
3) There are very few places to get the kind of interaction we have here in the monastery. Stack Overflow is close, but they have too many rules, prioritizing accuracy over participation. (What? I can't vote because I haven't contributed sufficiently? Lurkers get no respect.) If there's something to share, share the node link. Which you can do with the free nodelet hacks mentioned. I wouldn't mind seeing one for G+, but then, I didn't really want my G+ account associated with my perlmonks account. So I'd just share the link, probably summarize the content for the tl;dr crowd, and be done.
BTW, some people try to ask questions on LinkedIn groups. Not very effective, as not many people pay attention to that. Questions go unanswered, or answered poorly, for days and days. And since everyone "knows" everyone else, sometimes the urge to be nice gets in the way of a much needed "WTF are you doing that for?"
4) FB and other sites are typically used in a "friend zone", such that only friends can see your posts. But good content should have wider availability. And it's often annoying to wade through the cat videos and aphorisms to find the technical content you want. You don't go any old coffee shop for advice on building nuclear power plants, why would you go to any old social medai site to read about Perl? Sure, there are special coffee shops and special zones on social media that may apply, but it may take a long time to find them, and they popup and disappear at a whim. Perlmonks has been here (takes off shoes...) a long time.
-QM
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Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
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Re^2: Perl Monks monastery vs the Vatican
by Steve_BZ (Chaplain) on Dec 10, 2014 at 14:21 UTC
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Well maybe it doesn't, but we should at least go through the thought process of considering what advances there have been in the last ten or more years.
Look at this from 2012 Repainting the Monastery
Why don't we have a toolbar to make editing easier? Why is the edit box so small? Because it was designed on a 640x480 machine and no one has changed it!
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Interesting ideas. Since you haven't been around here as long as us (*cough*) old-timers, you've probably not read the posts about how the hardware and site is essentially free to us (but please find the donut button), and updates are by people with real jobs who help out because they have the skills, motivation, and time to do so. It's supposed to be a lean mean content site. As such, it should load very quickly on a phone, assuming a few personalized settings to reduce the sidebar clutter.
On my Firefox, the edit box is resizable. I don't look into that sorta stuff much, I take it for granted, so I'm not sure if there are some server side settings that will improve those kinds of issues.
Toolbar? I basically taught myself some HTML by wanting to post here, so I think it's a help, but I can see how someone wouldn't want to remember how to enter a less than or a bullet list. I can only offer that you might write it in something else and paste in the HTML equivalent, complete with custom site tags. Sorry.
I've also seen some folks wrestling with fancy sites that do all that sh*t for you. It's a nightmare, because you need a plugin for this, and a plugin for that, and this plugin isn't compatible with the framework version, or the other plugins you need, or your security plugin, and your hosting service doesn't allow SSH except from registered IPs and Tuesdays in months with the letter A in them. So the people with the most motivation to contribute content spend most of their time keeping the system from crashing, burn out, and find something more productive to contribute to.
If you want a pretty site, that's easy for our collective parent-in-laws to use, please feel free to start one. But this site is the way it is, because it is useful to its members, and has a reasonable barrier to entry for mischief makers. There's also some degree of growing into the community, by fiddling with all the knobs (and being told you're a knob sometimes).
Seriously, the only thing I've felt a very small need for is some image capability. But everyone seems to find someplace to host a screenshot or a big text dump, at least for a short time. Since the site hardware is essentially provided for free, I wouldn't want to waste storage space on cat videos for the sake of the rare screenshot.
But if you have a burning Perl question (and sometimes not even Perl), and you want a quick, accurate, efficient answer (really, all three are available most of the time), post your question here. I've had little questions that had 10 replies in 15 minutes, which unblocked my $work, and made me look impressive in the eyes of the boss. (Thanks to all of those responders over the years who have helped me out, put up with my stupidity, and let me post more questions and answers anyway!)
So please don't take this the wrong way. Many have come and said "Why are you so far behind?" And the answer has always been, "Why do we need more than this?". It's like NASA spending millions to develop a zero-G ballpoint pen, while the Russians are using pencils. We like suggestions, and we consider all reasonable ideas (and sometimes the unreasonable ones). Then like anything else, it comes down to what to do, who has the skill, and who has the time. Many "nice to have" ideas have fallen by the wayside for lack of any of those three points. Mostly we only need pencils here. Sometimes we'd like to have zero-G ballpoint laser GPS quantum tunneling time machine teleporting 3D printers. But then we'd become rich and famous, and we couldn't stand for that.
-QM
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Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
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Why is changing Perlmonks automatically equivalent of taking away from what it is now? I think the OP argues that it could be all that and additionally a marketing success for the Perl language. The whole site is organized around volunteers. I would think it would not be that hard to find a few. It seems every suggestion of improvement is met with the same checklist of why Perlmonks is good so far. Same with Perl for that matter. Why do we need more than this? Why do we eat Steak instead of Millet?
Image capability? Why not? Maybe that could be the first concrete suggestion. Storage gets cheaper every day. I don't know why at least the practicalities of it can't be investigated. It shouldn't be insulting or surprising to anyone that some members would question the way things are. None of it is meant disrespectfully.
Realistically though, how much benefit could a facelift bring? Would it attract new members? I think it would be cool if the Monastery did something really cool that coincided with a Perl announcement of some sort..
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QM wrote, "...(but please find the donut button)"
I looked and looked again but I couldn't find the donut button.
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You can configure your edit box. Mine is textarea {width:70em; height:35em;} (via the Display Settings).
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[d/l] |
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Why is the edit box so small? Because it was designed on a 640x480 machine and no one has changed it!
Actually, my edit box is a gvim window spawned via the ViewSourceWith Firefox plugin. Because any browser textbox is gonna be miserable next to a real text editor. This reply itself is about the limit for anything I'd type without spawning something more capable than anything in the browser anyway...
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