# The following was supposedly scribed by # Ken Williams # on Thursday 22 July 2004 01:50 pm:
>I was sort of hoping this idea would just die on its own, but now it >looks like people are actually getting ready to do it. � I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with Ken on this one. >In my opinion >this is a bad idea. �I don't want a bunch of reviews all over CPAN >disguising themselves as modules. When the discussion started, it was about the ratings and reviews system which is already available on CPAN (though little-used.) I suggested why it was little-used, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. >So how >about working with those people to fix whatever you think is broken >about them before polluting CPAN with all this non-code? Let's take a tour... searching for something... http://search.cpan.org/search?query=CGI&mode=all we click through... http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.05/CGI.pm NO RATINGS ON THAT PAGE! So, we click the 'up'-like link... http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.05/ ok, now we see the ratings, click-through to get reviews... http://cpanratings.perl.org/d/CGI.pm Or do we? I get a 404. Not much use. To continue the tour, let's hop over to some module which does have reviews... http://cpanratings.perl.org/ Alright, pick one at random... http://cpanratings.perl.org/d/YAML Finally, here we are at a page with reviews. Frankly, I've never seen one of these before, and I can't say that this one really does me a huge amount of good. I'm much better served by reading the documentation (which should speak for the quality of the module on it's own.) However, the 1-5 star rating DOES provide a nice at-a-glance view of others' opinions. So, we have ratings, and we have reviews. What's wrong? If anything, the ratings should be shown in the header of the documentation page: http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.05/CGI.pm and possibly even in a column of the search results (now, THAT would be really useful), instead of 3-clicks into my search. And, clicking on the bar-o-stars should be a link to the reviews (which should, of course, work.) It is worth noting that I (and likely many others) rarely make it to the third click. Rather, I skim the documentation, and from there I'm off to a terminal where I type "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and install the module. There's more to be done to make it easier to rate and review modules (and one should be able to rate without reviewing for a simple thumbs-up (though 3-or-less stars may require explanation...)) But, the first thing to do is to MAKE THE RATINGS VISIBLE. That won't be accomplished by creating a new website (except as a trial 'fork' of the main one) and it won't be accomplished by pretending that Ratings::foo is a module. Yes, this is long, and SORRY FOR SHOUTING. I'm just trying to emphasize the important bits for those that are skimming. There have been others with mostly the same opinions throughout this discussion, so we basically just need the source for search.cpan.org and somebody to write a patch, right? --Eric -- "Everything goes wrong all at once." --Quantized Revision of Murphy's Law
