A few thoughts: * On hgsvn I see some points, but no indication on the scale. That is, there's 1 and 2 points, but out of... 5? Once I'm logged in I can see the scale, but not until then.
* There's a bunch of different ideas on how to average scores. I don't have an opinions at the moment, except that we keep enough data to change the algorithm in the future. Specifically the score, user, date (i.e., not just aggregate information). * I expect the comment/rating activity to be relatively low, so throwing everything away on every release seems problematic. For comments specifically it would be nice if they remained, though maybe old comments could be hid by the maintainer (or by anyone?) Hiding might just put them in a place where they were hidden (visible with a Javascript control). Scoring I'm less sure about; you could weight scores according to their distance from the current release. Or throw them away as you are doing now; I'm generally less concerned with scoring than comments. * Since people can and will report problems (like with hgsvn), it would be nice if the comments were threaded so that problems could be responded to. * Because people report problems anyplace they can, this is going to be hard for some maintainers, because there will be unanswered questions the maintainer won't be aware of. Emailing new comments would be really helpful (maybe as a user preference). * Comments on Trove classifiers would be nice. Though right now the classifiers are too hard to find and the actual categories not well used or complete enough. But if they *were* well used, this would be a place for people to put comparative comments (e.g., on this page for XML: http://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=browse&show=all&c=500 -- but getting to that page was really hard). * Generally I think it would be a lot more useful to people finding packages if there were topic guides, which would have a description of a class of tasks (like parsing XML) and a user-curated list of packages that apply. In theory the wiki could be used for this, and people try to use it for this, but it's not very successful (e.g., http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks -- which is a lot better than it has been at many points in the past). Having a list of packages with the age of the last release, the score of the package, Development Status trove classifier, the short description from PyPI, etc. would make a much nicer list. But it has to be curated -- package maintainers don't consistently use package metadata well enough to make this work. * Can you not comment on your own packages? Not scoring is fine, but comments should be available. * It would be nice to have a field that links to an issue tracker or forum of some sorts, and display that right next to the comment box, like "If you have an issue use <project's issue tracker>". hgsvn is an example of when that isn't used. Alternately a field that would render right next to the comment box (ReST) where the project can give instructions (like: if you need help, jump on #project on irc.freenode.net, or `submit a bug <...>`_ or `search our mailing list <...>`_). Free text would probably be better, as it gives full flexibility. * Less flexibly, a default message about what should go in comments would be helpful. I'm not sure what the description should be, but just "comment" isn't enough IMHO. -- Ian Bicking | http://blog.ianbicking.org | http://topplabs.org/civichacker
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