But at this point, we have a substantial code base all written in Perl, and the effort involved in rewriting it would be prohibitive. Besides, Perl is cool. Time is a resource that we always lack, so anything that we do that increases the amount of time required to maintain Slashdot has to be weighed carefully. A good example is the existing submission monitoring functionality. The amount of email I got regarding rejected submissions more then doubled when I added notification.
Abuse is much worse.
From there, we move to the many stories that are submitted which are very wrong for Slashdot. They are horribly off topic, or offensive, or just plain scary. I don't want to propagate this stuff, and I'm afraid that another public forum for them would only make the problem worse. There is some stuff submitted that would make for a very interesting page, and maybe someday we'll implement that. But as it stands, the overhead and the potential for abuse is so high that we don't want to mess with it.