Mark Stosberg writes: > From another angle, I see the current problem with the rating system > is not abuse-- I've never noticed any beyond people rating their own > modules with 5 stars with reviews like "It's my module". It's primary > downfall now is that it's simply not being used a lot. Making further > barriers to using it would only serve to work this worse.
Yes. My biggest problem with CPAN Ratings at the moment is the amount of hero-worship and mutual backslapping going on. The modal score for individual ratings is clearly 5 stars -- sometimes the homepage can be seen with 15 or more consecutive reviews all with 5 stars (from a variety of different 'raters'). It looks like the next most-common rating is 1 star, for the people panning the completely worthless modules. Possibly just because that's easier to do, compared with other ratings. But I've seen 5-star reviews say things such as "will be a great module when it's finished" or "this is quite good, once you've worked round the docs which are far from easy to follow" -- where even within a single review the comments don't match the number of stars! Often the problem with ratings is that the rater hasn't used alternative modules sufficiently to know what else is out there. I really ought to rate more of the modules I use. Part of the problem is that I think of some niggle I could mention in a review, then it seems unfair on the author to complain about it without raising it as a bug report first, but then I'd have to come up with a test-case and ... then I put the whole thing off for later. Smylers
