I think there are issues with both ratings and comments, and that at the very least the decision to enable/disable them should be left to the package's administrator.
First up, ratings and comments in general: Ratings face the well-documented issue of clustering -- the YouTube data is one useful point, and there are plenty of others which indicate that, on anything more complex than an up/down rating, the observed ratings will cluster on one or both extremes of the rating scale. Comments face a related issue which exposes the psychology a bit more clearly: there's a barrier to commenting (you have to register), and so only people who feel strongly that their comment should be seen will put in the effort to get it posted. In my experience, this results in the opposite of the YouTube phenomenon: comments will tend to cluster strongly around the negative extreme of the spectrum (people who are very upset about something are generally willing to go to more effort to express their feeling than people who are very happy about it). Next, the problems with PyPI's implementation in particular: Ratings, while less useful than they could otherwise be, don't really seem to be the issue. Rather, comments are. Specifically... * Since package maintainers are typically already pressed for time, it's unlikely they'll participate much even if granted the ability to do so, preferring instead the discussion and support channels they've already set up. * But since package maintainers cannot currently respond to comments, they're useless as a means of communicating with package authors or meaningfully discussing packages. * Since package maintainers also cannot remove abusive comments, PyPI presents an "attractive nuisance" of sorts; people who wish to troll or bash on a package/author will be able to do so with no particular consequences. * Since package maintainers have no way -- short of ad-hoc attempts to abuse package descriptions -- to point users toward more useful discussion forums, it's likely that at least some users will never discover such forums. * Corollary: since PyPI has pretty decent Google juice, it's likely that at least some users will confuse it with an official support channel (see, for example, the infamous Maury Povich incident[1]). The fact that PyPI displays official Python branding exacerbates this problem (see also: the controversy over GetSatisfaction using company logos[1]). Where I stand, personally: I'd like very much for both ratings and comments to just go away. If someone wants to provide a third-party service which *does not* have official Python branding, that'd be fine, because it's unlikely anyone would confuse such a service for an official support channel. At the very least, the ability to disable comments should be in the hands of the package maintainer(s), and PyPI should offer a mechanism for connecting users to official support channels for packages. If the implementation stays as-is, well, looks like the only option I'll have left is to pull my packages off the index. Fortunately, the standard tools all seem to work well with package URLs instead of PyPI package names... [1] http://www.metafilter.com/33213/Tuesdays-with-Maury [2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else -- "Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct." _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
