IMHO, maybe a guidelines statement on the Ratings website would help. In general, I think one should comment on "competing" modules within the context of inline POD, and authors of such modules should avoid rating the "competition" on this service.
One of my favorite examples of a well-written "See Also": http://search.cpan.org/~odigity/Parallel-Simple-0.01/lib/Parallel/Simple.pm# SEE_ALSO I've got a CPAN module NCBIx::BigFetch that downloads sequences from NCBI, so I will abstain from rating anything that does something similar (in say BioPerl). If I need to comment on a module from that Bundle, I will do it my "See Also". Of course I am free to rate YAML a 5 Star Module (which I just did) because as a user of that module, I find it to be continuously useful (and I will most likely never write a configuration module). YMMV (which was already implied by "posting") I think we would all like to be able to compare "competing" modules more easily. There clearly is a marketplace of ideas, but our marketplace lacks tools for shoppers. From a shopper's perspective - the ratings system itself is not the tool; it's the data within the system. We need more (and more thoughtful) data. Surely no one is complaining about the number of comments that any given rater makes; more's the better. I just signed up and added my first rating, and since I'm giving two seminars this month on "useful CPAN modules", I will probably be adding more very soon. Incidentally - the commentary below was actually very timely for me. Please feel free to send me your own suggestions (directly)! ;} Thanks! Roger Hall -----Original Message----- From: Burak Gürsoy [mailto:burakgur...@gmx.net] Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 11:11 AM To: module-authors@perl.org Subject: "PBP Module Recommendation Commentary" and recent CPAN ratings spammings Hi, First the related URLs: http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?pbp_module_recommendation_comm entary and http://cpanratings.perl.org/user/dandv I wonder who created that page on perlfoundation.org? While it claims to be the "community best practices" it even lists Module::Build as "maybe" I think this page is mostly ridiculous. What do you think?
