On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 03:26:56PM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> *>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?
>
> That's a big question and I have a long answer for that but mostly I've
> only seen stuff like Randal extorting authors with 1-star ratings, authors
> sniping at each other via rantings and in module docs and, when they
> aren't petty and vile they're 5-stars with 'great module'. There's a
> smattering of useful reviews but, as on Amazon, YMMV. What's wrong isn't a
> software issue.
How would you suggest we deal with this? Maybe a bit of moderator
intervention?
I concur with this, btw. The earlier "sacrifice stone" thread had me
picturing my modules (ok, me really) strapped to the stone and a venomous
critic with a very sharp knife getting ready to perform amateur surgery.
One of the big reasons I haven't published much lately is it isn't
worth it for me to put on an asbestos suit to try to contribute.
That said, perhaps it would be useful to have a set of "standard"
sort of comments that could be applied to the module, such as "some tests don't
seem to pass" or "requires compilation on the target platform", "module shares
similar functionality as XX", etc. along with other ratings. This would
hopefully be useful but not condescending information.
Austin
