g0n wrote:

One advantage of cpanforums does strike me though: a year or so ago, I was having trouble getting a module to work at all, and wanted to contact the author. I tried half a dozen different addresses that the author had listed at one time or another, and all bounced. If a module has been abandoned, at least Cpanforums gives the community the opportunity to advertise and/or discuss the fact in an obvious and well advertised location, with direct links to the module page on CPAN.

And that's why I'm posting this here: this is the meta-PerlMonks discussion section, and the place to suggest software, policy, and behaviour enhancements.

What I think about CPANForums is that this is Yet Another Place to Post Module discussion (not support, nor bugs! -- threre are specific, well-advertised places for them).

To make mine your example, if an author abandon a module, there should be a place at PerlMonks where the community could discuss about this and volunteers could offer your free time to take care of a module. Also, this place could offer RSS feeds for module authors about his/her modules, so they don't need to look for posts at PerlMonks.

What I'm effectivelly suggesting is that PerlMonks offer kind of a Module Forum, where architectural issues and orphanage/adoption of modules could take place, without interfering with the http://rt.cpan.org (for bugs) and the author's emails and discussion list (for support).

This way, the community could concentrate its activities arround a single place, easying maintainer's life and making simpler and fair the adoption of orphaned modules.

But this, of course, is just my humble opinion about what I've read about this issue.