thanks everyone for the comments. Nick had an interesting comment I'm forwarding. It's great that Gordon has volunteered to help with what Dries said. (I don't know enough to help.) Re Robert's comment that there are obscure but great modules, it makes sense to me that there should be a way to rename modules (or at least link new names to modules), and a page to submit new name suggestions. If it does not take too much time, I may be able to volunteer to monitor such a page, and change the names of modules, or something. ae On Tue, 2006-01-24 at 21:42 -0600, Nick Lewis wrote:
I moved this to infastructure [it seemed like the right place]... I think something like this would really be helpful to new and old users alike. In order to gauge a module's stability, I have to sort through filters of messages, and CVS histories. Most people think CVS is a place to fill prescriptions.
Of course, the number of downloads would only be a useful measure (in my opinion) with the following additional measures(stolen from downloads.com to some extent):
a) a non-anonymous rating system that requires a drupal.org user account. Ratings include: 1=doesn't work at all, 2=frequently crashes site 3=kind of buggy 4=reliable, with minor bugs 5=recommended
b) number of downloads -- by total, by month, and by week
c)open comments on module front page.
It is fairly time consuming to research a module -- to tell you the truth, I usually just test out the module on a live site. And while bug reports work well for experienced users, and/or users with time, a more instant way to give feedback would be nice. I'd love to see a module's front page have a comment at the top of the page that says "This module rocks!", or "this module broke my site".
All together, expanding the ways that users can give feedback on modules would be a great improvement to drupal.org. It would both help good modules gain attention, and use, while singling out certain modules that fail to work Installing modules is too much like gambling... Seasoned users have learned to live with it; however, new users may very well judge drupal badly as a whole when they use a module that doesn't work.
Few cents of a recently devalued currency, Nick Lewis http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com