CPAN Forum

Why can't I login?
Can I link to a specific Module's page in the forum?
RSS and Atom feeds
Can I get notified when a new post arrives?
Why do I need this? We already have our mailing list!
OK, but why web forum? Why not a mailing list with topics?
Add tags to CPAN modules
Data supplied by CPAN::Forum

Why can't I login?

Don't know. Send a note to Gabor Szabo with your username, I might be able to help.

Can I link to a specific Module's page in the forum?

To link to the forum of a specific distribution you can link to:
http://www.cpanforum.com/dist/Package-Name

RSS and Atom feeds

Currently you can get the following RSS feeds:

http://www.cpanforum.com/rss/all - latest posts
http://www.cpanforum.com/rss/threads - latest posts
http://www.cpanforum.com/rss/dist/Distro-Name - latest posts in distro
http://www.cpanforum.com/rss/author/PAUSEID - latest posts in any of the distros of the given CPAN author
http://www.cpanforum.com/rss/tags - latest tags

Atom feeds:

http://www.cpanforum.com/atom/all - latest posts
http://www.cpanforum.com/atom/threads - latest posts
http://www.cpanforum.com/atom/dist/Distro-Name - latest posts in distro
http://www.cpanforum.com/atom/author/PAUSEID - latest posts in any of the distros of the given CPAN author

Can I get notified when a new post arrives?

Yes, you can subscribe to e-mail alerts for

all the distributions
all the distributions of a given CPAN author
a single distribution

In each case you have 3 options:

All messages - you get notification about every message sent to this group
Thread starters - Whenever someone starts a new thread you get a notification. On subsequent posts to the same thread you don't get any message.
Followups - You get all the messages sent to a certain thread that you have participated in. These won't necessarily be responses tou your message but will be in the same thread so presumably you are somewhat interested.

When looking at the page of each module (/dist/Module-Name) you'll see a link to configure the notification level for that module. By default you don't get any mail. When you want to change your subscription you can do it from MyPAN

Why do I need this? We already have our mailing list!

Of course the established distribtions already have their mailing lists. This means 100-200 maybe even 500 distributions. But there are over 10,000 distributions on CPAN. Even if we say that half of them don't need any kind of mailing list or forum and should not be there anyway it still leaves more than 5000 distributions that could do with a some kind of a forum.
You can also look at it from the other side. Someone who uses 30-50 modules on a regular basis, does s/he need to subscribe to 30-50 mailing lists? That's a nightmare. What if I just want to ask one question about a module and I'd like to ask the most knowledgeable about this module? Should I subscribe to a mailing list and then unsubscribe from it after a few days?
On this forum people can have one centrally managed subscription and discuss all the modules they use. Their mail boxes won't be flooded by messages (unless they really want it) and they can selectively view the discussions.

OK, but why web forum? Why not a mailing list with topics or a news group?

Although there are mailing lists that could be used to manage 3-6000 different subgroups, in my experience most people won't use them, for various reasons:
E-mail lists:

They don't know how to subscribe
They want to send HTML messages while most of the heavy users don't like that
People are afraid that their mail box will be filled with unnecessary messages or SPAM, or viruses
People are afraid that they won't be able to unsubscribe.

News groups:

That might be good as well but it seems HTTP is a bit more popular than NNTP.

Web forums:

People are usually much more familiar with web forums than either e-mail lists or news groups
This is pull technology, they visit when they want.
They don't visit when the don't want.

Add tags to CPAN modules

In order to further improve the way we can find solutions on CPAN several people suggested some kind of categorization or tagging of the modules. To faciliate this need CPAN::Forum allows you to add your own tags to the individual modules.
When enough tags are collected this information will be made available to anyone wishing to build or improve a CPAN search tool.
As a starter when you visit the page of any of the distributions, you will see the tags you added and will be able to add more tags. (A comma separated list of expressions).
In addition you can see all the current tags
Soon you'll be able to see all the tags you created and all the modules you tagged. You'll also be able to see tags created by others.

Data supplied by CPAN::Forum

If other sites wouldlike to include data collected by CPAN::Forum, this is what we have:
Number of posts per module In format: Module,42
List of tags on each module In format: Module,tag1,tag2,tag3
Partial dump of the database, mainly the tables related to tags.