I'd agree with Jonas, the only way is to ask authors to clean their own home.
from very official to non official:
- mail all authors (that would also list all those with broken mail
addresses)
- something on perl.org
- ask Perl monger groups to take the subject up
- quick presentation at conferences
- Perlbuzz entry
- any/all of the Perl news site that end up in the many aggregators
- ...
- whine on IRC
- offer a Perl T-shirt with 'YES! I removed all the modules that were
more
than 5 years old on my CPAN.' to all those that do some cleaning (prepare to
heavily invest in a small factory for this one)
I'm not sure all authors know where to find all their modules listed and how
to send them to backpan. I look into my PAUSE account, there are certainly
more ways.
Having CPAN search engines displaying a different background color when there
is too much trash around may make authors aware that something should be done.
I have found out that I have an COC (CPAN overweight coefficient) of 73/34
(couch potatoe).
coefficient => author type
< 1 CPAN sickness
1 cleaning athlet
< 2 mama's boy
< 3 couch potatoe
< 4 lazy Tunisian snake on a hot summer day
< 5 Wanted by the CPAN police
