For some time now I have been promising to publish the list of CPAN Authors who for one reason or another, appear to be uncontactable. These are authors, who when using their PAUSEID @ cpan.org address, generates a rejection of some form. Typically this appears to be for addresses which are set up to be used in redirection, which have since been made obsolete (perhaps from changing jobs or personal domain), but there are a few that are just not setup to receive emails.

Recently Leo Lapworth updated several of the perl.org sites he's been working on to list the current stats for CPAN, as was previously seen in the footer of each search.cpan.org page. It's good to remind people (even subconsciously) just how big CPAN is. In his post Leo also wondered what the 20,000th distribution was. With the CPAN Testers database holding lots of stats about CPAN, as well as the CPAN Testers reports, it was…

Back In January, I reported how Microsoft had launched what amounted to a denial of service attack on the CPAN Testers server. It seems that 4 months later, we have yet again been targeted for attack from Microsoft. After the last attack, any IP address matching '65.55.*.*', hitting the main CPAN Testers website, was blocked (returning a 403 code). Every few weeks I check to see whether Microsoft have actually learnt and calmed down their attack on the server. So far, disappointingly, despite an alleged Microsoft developer saying they would…

A late and very short summary this month, as I was hoping to have a bit more news this time around. As David notes in his update, the work on the Metabase has been continuing, with some stress testing to ensure we can handle a high volumes of report submissions. There have been some upgrades to the code during the last month, as we have refined the APIs. Unfortunately we've hit a hurdle with the search API at the current time. Once we overcome this, then we should be in a good position to make the switch…