Sinatra Loves Dancer :)
For some reason Dancer was able to attract a few trolls (though we only suspect it's 2-3 people overall). Those 2-3 people have been trying to destroy Dancer and its community by flooding our IRC channel, writing plenty of disgusting remarks on Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter and recently by flooding our CPANRatings page.
Unfortunately none of this worked and the community had only flourished thanks to both hardcore Perl devs and beginner users who came out of the woodwork of dark Perl web programming into the funhouse that is Dancer and its community.
We've had a lot of awesome contributors, a lot of great feedback (some was "you're just awesome", some "you're missing this or that" - which were both very helpful!) and we've seen more and more users coming out, talking to us about how much they enjoy Dancer and how we could improve it and even lending a hand in everything from code, documentation to even helping other community members. It is really really inspiring.
The recent CPANRatings issue got our attention. We've seen some really bad reviews (mainly just a single star), completely non-constructive criticism (the type of "this sucks" with no reason why) which seem to mainly troll and condemn the CPANRatings system to be useless. What a shame.
One caught our attention because it was under the name of one of the core developers of Sinatra (our inspiration), who lives at SF (which was at a really late time to be up and writing reviews online!), saying that it's an insult we've been inspired by Sinatra. This was very weird. We contacted Sinatra themselves and they've not only heard nothing about it, but were actually very excited about Dancer. They were so awesome they actually wrote the following post: Sinatra Loves Dancer[1].
Another review was in the name of the lovely Su-Shee, that seemed very harsh and non-constructive. This didn't seem to fit the real Su-Shee who is full of kitty fluff, if you know her for more than 10 seconds. :)
It's horrible the trolls are starting to take real people's handles and names, whether they're acclaimed Ruby programmers or acclaimed Perl programmers and community members. Just terrible. Su-Shee, by the way, was quick to correct it on the ratings page, the original rating apparently deleted.
So, to the trolls who are apparently so threatened by Dancer (thanks for the compliment, by the way :), you should know that not only did we prove you're trolls, we rode your trolling to actually advertise us MUCH MORE in the world, via the fine people of Sinatra and their community and the Perl community who despises trolls.
If you're one of the people who hate seeing trolls (how can you not be?), and you think CPANRatings shouldn't be given up on and you use Dancer and like it, head over to Dancer's CPANRatings and show us some loving!
Let's give a hand to the Dancer community, and damn it, to the entire Perl community! :)
While we're at it, Sinatra, you serious rock, and keep providing us with inspiration!
[1] http://www.sinatrarb.com/2011/07/21/sinatra-loves-dancer.html
[2] http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Dancer
Gots to do the bloggingz
Sad that programmers can act like children.
Dancer is great.
It would be nice to have a "flag this" link next to reviews so a moderator could come along and delete trash. That might even help some people who post trash. I know at least a couple of people have been passed over for jobs based on their rants on cpanratings. Yep, Perl-clued employers know where to look for that sort of stuff. :)
https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues/15
I remember when I first wrote a review on cpanratings, there were so few reviews being submitted that it was still half way down the top page months later. The site has become much more busy then for some reason.
Ah, I guess there won't be a report abuse button then, but I think Ask's not considering the user side. That there is a "report abuse" button at all is something that increases the trust of the system, so although there might not be a huge abuse problem, that people know they can report it makes them feel better.
I had another idea though. The overall ranking should be a weighted average of the ratings. Take the weights from the "M of N people found this helpful".
That's a good idea! (the overall ranking based on weighted average)