Greetings, I have been noticing that the CPAN search site and possibly other module archives are not taking into account when distributions are deleted, and so our public listings are having an abundance of dead links. Taking for example my own author page, at "http://search.cpan.org/search?author=DUNCAND", there are 8 distributions listed, but only 5 are valid and 3 of them haven't existed for months. I am having a problem with the fact that visitors keep going to the author page where they see listings for modules that were deleted long ago, and when clicking on them get dead links. And this can discourage them before they move on and click on other modules that still exist. Similarly, I am finding that many modules belonging to other people are still listed in the directory or search results, and yet clicking on their names produces no results. In related cases, I started off with my 17-18 modules in a single distribution, and over time divided them up or recombined them into new distributions as appropriate. I delete old versions of my distributions as new ones become available, so people just use the new ones. So at least my PAUSE directory is easy to keep clean with the deleting page. But is it possible to have a utility for cleaning up our CPAN Search listings? This would go a long way to making the directory more useful. So has anyone else noticed this problem, and what do you suggest to resolve it? Thank you, // Darren Duncan
