No question, CPAN has a lot of jewels, good stuff and crap in it. So, IMHO, a disscusion about how to make CPAN a better place is not wasted time and hopefully this discussion will motivate a view fellow monks to spend some time to actually get something done in that matter.

The best thing you can do, is to talk to the author if something smells rotten. And I can promise you, most authors won't kill you, but will hapilly listen to your advice. Before I got replaced by a computer (1) , I was probably one of the most active CPAN testers of the "Next Generation" (2) . During that time I exchanged mails with a few hundred CPAN authors including topics like bugs, documentation bugs, makefile problems, etc. pp.
People viewed by many as the gods , authors who have a reputation to be a little difficult in the perl community , newbee authors, etc., usually are quit happy to get well thought bug reports or critics on their module. With some authors I spent much over a week until they got there module right, some authors corrected the problems within one hour and I can only remember one single author who repeatedly ignored my and others advice, but only changed something if the critic was made public.

For a while I made CPAN a better place and have the experience to make some general remarks about authors and there attitude to react friendly. So go ahead and talk to the authors. If that does not help, there are other possibilities; all discussed in this thread.

(1) Don't take that to serious.
(2) Viewing Paul Schinder as the leading tester of the "first Generation", who is probably still unbeaten in quantity and quality and Randy Kobes as one of the most active testers besides me, while I was doing it.

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