I find that with larger modules and/or "frameworks" the community is more important. Especially since when project reaches a certain point, it goes beyond the scope/brain of a single author and becomes truly a community effort. At that point, the strength of the community is usually directly tied to the success of the project. Personally I think a little in-fighting and occasional butting of heads is a good thing, it shows that the project is active and its developers/users are passionate, but beware of poisonous people they can bring it down.

As for help, mailing lists are a good place to look, but Perl also has a pretty large IRC component as well, which should be taken into account. For instance the Pugs project took place largely on IRC, and occasionally spilled into the Perl 6 mailing lists. Of course IRC tends to sometimes be a little more abusive then mailing lists, but it can be a great way to get questions answered quickly.

With smaller modules, or niche modules, there may not be a community because honestly the subject of the module is not that interesting. For these I usually judge these modules on a few criteria:

• Module author reputation

  This is not always easy to determine, but if an authors work is well regarded among those I respect, its a point in favor.

• Quality of tests and documentation

  Some people write bad tests and good docs, others write good tests and bad docs, some (in rare cases) write both. IMO you can always glean "documentation" from good tests, so I favor them. An absence of both is pretty much a giant warning flag for me, so I tend to avoid those modules unless ...

• Quality of code

  If I don't trust the authors work already or if their tests and/or docs are not excellent, but the module still seems useful, I do some source diving. I am looking for well structured clean code, solid design and algorithms and very few "# XXX - not sure why this is needed, but it works ;)" type comments. This is also important since if I am at this stage, I have resigned myself to the possibility I might need to either heavily patch, take-over, fork, or re-write this module myself depending on the openness of the author.

Anyway, thats my 2 cents.