very nice!

Can we collaborate on this and make one such system instead of two ?

The idea of integrating annocpan with cpanforum is a good one, although I don't know exactly how we could do it. The plan with annocpan is not to have discussions but just to post short notes, although someone suggested that I should add a threading feature for notes because inevitably people will post notes to reply to other people's notes. The notes, in any case, are about specific paragraphs of the POD, not about the module in general, but the page could be linked to a general discussion, or the general discussion could be shown at the bottom of the page, as in php.net.

In any case, the plan is to make the note database available for reuse in other sites; in particular, it would be great if it could be used by search.cpan.org .

I think the reasons why people are opposed to yet-another web forum include:

• Yet-another place to look for mail. (This is why some people only show up on PM every few weeks or months ...) We're all very used to checking our in-boxes. Anything arriving there gets our automatic attention. By automatic, I mean that we don't need to do anything.
• Yet-another way to create messages. I'm sorry, but even PM's web interface just simply doesn't hold a candle to editing mail in KMail. And I'm sure most people, when comparing this to their own email programs, would agree. I don't want to learn yet-another interface to typing stuff in. (I also want to find a better way to interact with PM... this text area is annoyingly small...)
• Yet-another way to interact with messages. KMail has collapsing threads where I can see all my threads at once. PM ... does not. Does CPAN::Forum? Probably not. But it does have a different way to interact with messages than PM - so it's still yet-another thing to learn. I've already learned my email program, why learn more?

One of the reasons why mailing lists are so popular is that, once signed up, you really don't need to learn a new interface to get at the new information. Newsgroups? Heck, some software treats them exactly like email, so you get email and news in the same interface - again, no learning curve. And because launching your email client is something that many people just accept as a fact of daily life, anything that integrates into that is already integrated into daily life.

Why is the Monastery successful ?

Some enriching reading for you : Why does PerlMonks work?

the reasons PHP has significantly more users in the web development area is that they understand the web better than we, Perl developers do

How do they understand the web better than us?

By spreading the net with a bunch of SQL-injection prone sites?
By encouraging the passage of variables from the user input to HTML rendering without checking anything?
By making it easy the bad habit of mixing programming logic and output?

It's true that you can write bad code in every language, but PHP makes things really easy for bad coders.

How bad coding habits increases their "understanding of the web" is really beyond me.

I can only agree with dbwiz ,


It's true that you can write bad code in every language, but PHP makes things really easy for bad coders.


Update:Fixed wrong order blockquote,italic tags. Thanks Fletch.
I submit the following example I was confronted with recently after migrating an 'acquired' companies site from a Cobalt. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I'm trying to discover why and how much they paid for this abortion.

I discussed with the developer the register_globals-ness of this code and it's reliance on php4.2.x session side effects and other things. His suggestion to


Best thing is look at the php.ini file on the old server. Also make sure the versions of php and mysql are the same.


Yeah - php and mysql circa 2002. This message broke the light barrier on it's way my supervisor.
Read more... (2 kB)
I particularly like
• the boilerplate cargo cult'd from ???
• the purpose definition in the boilerplate
• function is_admin
• function page_close

I can't believe it's not psellchecked

It's true that you can write bad code in every language, but PHP makes things really easy for bad coders.

Interesting, I knew this sentece in this form:

It's true that you can write bad code in every language, but Perl makes things really easy for bad coders.

Anyway, I never said PHP programmer know how to write code. I said they understand how the web works. It might not have been clear but I meant what they create seems to be much more (web)user (and beginner) friendly. Both for end users and for beginner web application developers.

Personally, I like mailing lists, because email is for me a very convenient way to centralize incoming messages/notices. I prefer notifications over polling, whenever the stream of notifications can be directly attributed/routed. Both, RT and possibly CPAN Forum have such a low-volume, but directly routed scheme - if somebody submits an RT ticket, or asks a question about my module, that is more or less directly a case for me to decide on, while Perlmonks has much "noise" that does not need my undivided or immediate attention.

That CPAN Forum is on the web makes it convenient for those seeking answers, but not necessarily for those providing these answers, as the questions are (hopefully) not frequent enough to make constant polling effective.

First I'd like to thank you for starting CPAN::Forum. The best way to know if such an idea can work is to try it.

I suspect that it will be especially valuable for modules which don't have a dedicated mailing list: web searches will point to CPAN::Forum as well as to various posts on mailing list archives, and chances are that it will be easier for users to find the answer to an already asked question on CPAN::Forum, saving everyone's time. Essentially it could play the role of a service hosting mailing lists for each module of CPAN.

I think the main concern developers seem to have with it, that it is yet another place to visit to support their module, is greatly alleviated by the fact that they can receive an email notification anytime someone posts on the thread about their module. There also seems to be an RSS feed for each module.

In the end I think CPAN::Forum is an interesting idea, and I don't think it adds that much noise to the already fragmented CPAN support system.

Good luck

to my understanding - one of the key issues that came up was that people rather use mailing lists than web forums.

First, thanks much for your work, I appreciate it even though I don't like it at all for my own modules. I think CPAN Forum can be useful for some modules but can be a real drain for modules that already have a specific place for discussion. DBI related modules, for example, really, really, really, should be discussed on one of the perl.org DBI mailing lists. That's not because mailing lists are better than forums, it's because it is where the messages are guaranteed to be seen by other DBI users, and by DBI module developers. This is even more important for the discussion of potential new modules than it is for existing modules.

On PerlMonks, we have also many DBI users and module authors, even so, if someone comes up with a gnarly question or a module suggestion, they are pointed to the mailing lists. Hopefully CPAN Forum will work the same way - if a question gets asked and not answered or if a new module is proposed, someone will recommend that the discussion be moved to, or at least mentioned on, the existing mailing lists.

Hmm, yes I understand that concern and if I can manage I'd like to create a gateway between the forum and certain mailing lists so questions posted to the CPAN::Forum will apear on the mailing list and list posts (or only responses to posts on the forum) will show up on forum.

tree-like-thread

Thats in the TODO list.
Help is greatly appreciated for improving the look of the site

Using a mailing list requires either subscribing and unsuscribing a temporary mail account each time I move on to a new customer, or polling the (usually very user-unfriendly) web archives of the mailing lists. A webforum on the other hand, provides continuity, I can see the same messages on site on monday as I see at the weekend at home.

My feeling is that the ideal would be a combination of the two - a webforum with a decent UI, with the ability to subscribe & submit messages by mail, so users can use whichever interface they prefer.

Forums and mailing lists each have their strengths and weaknesses. Take PM for example. Implemented as a mailing list, it would generate hundreds of e-mails per day. Most people don't have the time and/or patience to deal with that. Also, the things we generally discuss are of long-lasting value. I've yet to see a mailing list with a halfway decent searchable archive. It just doesn't work well. PM as a forum is managable despite the high volume, and the content is around for a very long time, with a search function that, while not perfect, works well enough to save some people some time in repeating oft-asked questions.

On the other hand, there are circumstances in which lists are much better than forums. With lists, you never have to "check in" on your question to see if anybody's answered yet. With a list, it's right there staring you in the face. And with smaller, less vocal groups, a forum is often a complete failure. Few posts == few people checking in regularly == fewer posts == fewer people checking in regularly... I've seen forums go dormant for a month at a time. Something that rarely happens with a list (the question "Is this thing still on?" inevitably gets asked on a list, and will spark things up a bit).

So the answer, to which is better, is: "It depends." :-)
Check out JavaJunkies for an example of forums that aren't really working well (despite being an almost-exact copy of these forums, which work very well).

Which one is better for many to many communication?

• Mailing lists?
• Web forums?
• News groups?

However which "is better" is such a personal matter that I really couldn't answer your question with a non-biased judgement...

Still from the POV of my limited experience I'd say that somewhat surprisingly I find PM to be less addictive than clpmisc: see e.g. this (last!) article of mine, also available from Google.

Talking about communication quality and effectiveness, I'd feel inclined to say that they're also better in the mentioned NG. But that is plainly not true for things are not that simple.

On the one hand there is a general consenus amongst knowledgeable posters in clpmisc about good behavioural rules. This works 99% of times to achieve an extremely effective communication, and only in a minority of cases flames sustained by newbies who can't stop ranting about people being harsh to them and not giving them the kind of answer they want (e.g. "feed me mum!").

In brief it's much more of a RTFM kinda environment than PM. And the latter is more forgiving in turn. Thus IMHO some discussions here turn out on the average to be qualitatively slightly inferior. There's simply a different behavioural consensus: for example in some sense I have been bashed here for Re: Taking advantage of multi-processor architecture, whereas I can hardly imagine being bashed for it on clpmisc.

OTOH clpmisc is very much about how to do things in perl, and much less so than e.g. about perl per se. And while indeed technically advanced discussions do arise there every now and again, my first impression is that they're more likely to pop out here, well at least in the appropriate sections, that is...

Note: what I find at all effects appealing are integrated communication networks. So I'd be very fond of a community based on system supporting all three of a newgruoup, a mailing list and a web-based forum (well, to some approximation there is already stuff like that, e.g. many Perl mailing lists themselves also have a news-based gateways.) and all giving access to all of their respective resources, or as much as possible.