On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> wrote: > I ask not for myself, I know the answers to this and they suck. I've bitched > about this before and its not necessary to go into details again. I ask as > Joe Newbie CPAN Author who just got his first pile of failure reports and has > no idea what to do next.
Michael -- I'm really tempted to create an auto-responder for any Perl-QA email that mentions CPAN Testers and point out *AGAIN* that there is a cpan-testers-disc...@perl.org mailing list where most of the CPAN Testers hang out as well as most if not all of the CPAN Testers module authors. (Yes, some of us monitor this group too.) (My abbreviated tangential rant: wouldn't it be great if someone would update lists.perl.org or hand over maintenance?) > What there should be is simple instructions on how to get a message back to > the tester. This should be a single link or email address. [1] This was discussed at length when we cut over from email direct from testers to authors to a periodic notification service. It's harder for authors to contact testers. The flip side is that authors don't feel spammed. The vocal minority of those who shouted for an end to spam were louder than those who shouted that they wanted to just be able to hit 'reply' and send to authors. And since the NNTP web archive hides email addresses, a kludgy workaround was developed. (N.B. I'm not dissing the tool, Barbie, just that we have to do it in the first place) In the meantime, for those who want to have easy replies to authors, see http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-CPAN-Testers-Remailer > An immediate and relatively simple fix is to provide a single use mail address > on the report. A hash of the reporter's name and some unique information > about the report, perhaps something as simple as a UUID. The author mails > that and its delivered to the appropriate things, probably the test reporter > and maybe cpan-testers as well. Since switching from email to web-based submission is a major goal of the hackathon this weekend, and thus we'll be moving away from NNTP as an archive, we'll need to design a "report view" web page anyway, which could include a method to contact the author or otherwise reveal an email address in a spam-harvesting proof way. Can I put you down as volunteering to design something, get group consensus and then implement it? You can start by adding it to the roadmap and hackathon project pages here: * http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/Roadmap * http://qa-hackathon.org/wiki/CPANTesters See you at the hackathon! :-) -- David
