Your site maintainers are constantly improving the appearance and functions of PerlMonks to make your experience here the best it can be. To find out what has changed recently, or since the last time you logged in, peruse the headlines below. Also browse recent PerlMonks Discussions for a deeper view into what's in the pipeline for PerlMonks.
If you have questions about anything you read here, you may ask about it in the Chatterbox. If it's an issue of weightier import, you might consider posting a PMD.
In response to long-standing demand, the Front Page (The Monastery Gates) now includes a Perl News section, showing a few of the most recent Perl News posts.
You can control how many articles to show, or whether Perl News shouldn't be shown at all, in your User Settings. The default is to show two articles.
pmdev: also see this patch from late 2006
Formerly DOC-links couldn't distinguish between the function open and the pragma open.pm. The suffix ".pm" can now be used to mark a difference.
DOC-links combining functions and #deeplinks work now.
See NEW [doc://perldoc#deeplink] works now with all perldocs.
The Chatterbox now contains a link to recently sent messages in addition to the links to the archived and kept messages. Chatterbox: NEW link to sent messages
The Monastery Gates now displays the currently active quest(s), at the top. (Ordinarily this would be just one, the current "poll ideas quest".)
The Quests page now shows only the currently active quest(s).
For those who want to see all quests regardless of status, including past years' 'poll ideas quest's, there is a new separate page called All Quests.
This is a new feature available to members of the Orders of Monks. It is intended to replace the rather unwieldy wikis for intra-group discussion.
If you're a member of a group, go to the group page. The posts will be shown at the bottom, along with a link to post a new comment. If you are not in the group, you will not be able to see or contribute to the discussion.
It is strongly recommended, when offering a new top-level comment (direct reply) on a group, that you change the title to reflect your topic.
Whenever someone posts a direct reply to a group — which is essentially a top-level post under a group — it sends a notification message to all members of the group.
All nodes in a thread now have a <link rel="canonical" ...> tag. The tag points to the root node of the thread, and uses https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id= as the reference.
Instead of using the (still working) redirect of search.cpan.org the links from the CPAN nodelet now point directly to the equivalent metacpan.org URLs.
The *.pairsite.com SSL certificate is not served anymore from 209.197.123.153, and has been replaced by a Pair auto-generated Let's Encrypt certificate for perlmonks.com instead. This is not entirely satisfactory as the other domains (perlmonks.net and perlmonks.org) are not covered by this new certificate. We are working with Pair support to install a certificate that covers all domains, like on the other two machines.
Due to a change at pair.com the protocol is now https. Accesses via http will be served a redirect (302 Found) to the https site. The random monk images at the upper right corner seem to be hardcoded in the DB as http, patch written. There might be some absolute links somewhere which lead the served page to be marked unsecure (see "This site is not secure" warning message), especially improperly linked nodes in arbitrary nodes. We'll be tidying that.
The link to the RSS display style is now included in the page for Newest Nodes directly.
The default width of <textarea> tags has been changed to 100% via CSS.
The cookies that the Perlmonks domains set are now set as HTTP only cookies. This means that the most trivial XSS attack won't be able to steal cookies from here.
This should be testable locally by pasting the following text into your browser address bar while on a Perlmonks domain:
javascript:alert(document.cookies);
If the userpass cookie still shows up there, you might need to log out and log in again.
The CSS for the font size did not apply to the restructured nodelets that don't use TABLE tags anymore. I've added CSS rules for the appropriate DIVs.
After fixing the Apache configuration and installing the relevant module (Env::C) in the mainline Perl distribution, the timezone settings are re-enabled and the display of timestamps now reflects the settings again.
In a bout of cowboy-editing, the code base was made 5.22 compliant. This involved disabling some timezone setting so if you experience some timestamps in the wrong timezone this is likely caused by the change. That change is supposed to be temporary until the relevant module (Env::C) is loaded from the appropriate location again.
The "edit" form has been removed from the main display view of your posts, and pushed off into a separate edit page. Now if you visit one of your writeups you won't see an edit form right there, but you will see an 'Edit' link in the upper right.
This change was already in effect for a little while in a few sections (Obfu, Poetry, Meds...) and has now been rolled out to all sections.
Please see Editing your writeup is now a separate action from viewing a thread and voting on replies for further information and discussion.
The "root" writeup of a displayed thread is now enclosed in an html DIV element, with a distinct id: <div id="writeup">.
This DIV encloses everything from the reputation vote/display bar down to the bar which says "Comment on ... : Send private /msg ...".
It does not include the "Replies are listed ..." bar.
The system now sends notification messages upon certain additional events, in a manner very similar to how monks are notified when someone replies one of their nodes. By popular request:
Feel free to discuss these changes in PMD.
This change affects only those who access PerlMonks via URLs crafted in some way other than scraping the site; if you only use PerlMonks through its normal web user interface, you can ignore this. This change alters the "API" for sending private messages.
To send a public or private message, submit a HTTP request (either GET or POST should work) with a query parameter op=message, to invoke the message opcode. The Chatterbox, the Message Inbox, and all other ways to send messages are implemented to use this opcode. In the case of private messaging, this opcode had two ways of specifying the recipient. One way was to reply to a specific inbox message, by adding a replyto=[msgid] parameter; the other was to send to a specific user, by name, by adding a sendto=[username] parameter. With this change, the first way (replyto=[msgid]) is gone; and a new way is added, for sending to a specific user by ID: the sendto_opt parameter. Code should now use only ;sendto=[username] or ;sendto_opt=[userid] for sending private messages, and not replyto.
As of 2015-07-27, you will no longer see reaped nodes, nor any nodes below them in the "tree" of replies, in any threaded view. This is now default behavior, but logged-in monks can override this by checking the "Show Reaped" checkboxes in Newest Nodes Settings. Note that Anonymous Monk has no way to override this behavior, and now will never see any reaped node, except when landing directly on a reaped node's page.
Also, reaped nodes will now no longer be included in Super Search results, unless you explicitly include author NodeReaper in your search criteria. As above, this behavior is overrideable by the NN Settings variables.
This change should be considered experimental.
Wee "thank you". Please discuss in PMD.
Historically, comments (aka replies; technically notes) were shown below posts ordered chronologically, with the first (i.e. oldest) reply at the top, just below the post, down to the newest at the bottom. By popular demand, the default note ordering is now 'Best First' -- the reply with the highest reputation at the top, worst reputation at the bottom. This change primarily affects, and was primarily intended for, visitors. It may also affect logged-in users who have never specified a Note Ordering in their User Settings.
Also, the reply ordering in effect is shown below a note, along with the "Comment on..." link. (It is not shown if there are no replies, however.)
Please welcome jdporter to the ranks of the gods. His deific appellation is erzuuli.
Logged-in users can now apply a css stylesheet to nodes rendered using the 'bare' display style. See article in PMD for details.
Older posts moved to Tidings through 2014-11-10.