perlcommunity - a brief overview of the Perl community
This document aims to provide an overview of the vast perl community, which is far too large and diverse to provide a detailed listing. If any specific niche has been forgotten, it is not meant as an insult but an omission for the sake of brevity.
The Perl community is as diverse as Perl, and there is a large amount of evidence that the Perl users apply TMTOWTDI to all endeavors, not just programming. From websites, to IRC, to mailing lists, there is more than one way to get involved in the community.
There is a central directory for the Perl community: https://perl.org maintained by the Perl Foundation (https://www.perlfoundation.org/), which tracks and provides services for a variety of other community sites.
Perl's sister language, Raku (formerly known as Perl 6), maintains its own directory of community resources at https://raku.org/community/.
Perl runs on e-mail; there is no doubt about it. The Camel book was originally written mostly over e-mail and today Perl's development is co-ordinated through mailing lists. The largest repository of Perl mailing lists is located at https://lists.perl.org.
Most Perl-related projects set up mailing lists for both users and contributors. If you don't see a certain project listed at https://lists.perl.org, check the particular website for that project. Most mailing lists are archived at https://www.nntp.perl.org/.
The Perl community has a rather large IRC presence. For starters, it has its own IRC network, irc://irc.perl.org. General (not help-oriented) chat can be found at irc://irc.perl.org/#perl. Many other more specific chats are also hosted on the network. Information about irc.perl.org is located on the network's website: https://www.irc.perl.org. For a more help-oriented #perl, check out irc://irc.libera.chat/#perl (webchat). Most Perl-related channels will be kind enough to point you in the right direction if you ask nicely.
Any large IRC network (Dalnet, EFnet) is also likely to have a #perl channel, with varying activity levels.
Perl websites come in a variety of forms, but they fit into two large categories: forums and news websites. There are many Perl-related websites, so only a few of the community's largest are mentioned here.