For a few months now, Slaven Rezić has been asking me to look at the way the Find A Tester tool keeps bring back an old email address of his, rather than the current one. The problem is the way that Metabase now stores the tester reference for a report. Instead of a specific email address it stores a resource fact, that just happens to be a tester. The tester resource fact then has a number of email addresses associated with it, except it has no way of knowing a tester's preference for which email address is most suitable. As such the list I retrieve, is essentially random. There isn't a good way to distinguish between new and old address.

In my workings on the CPAN Admin site (more news on that very soon), I spotted a gap in the knowledge a tester can tell us about themselves. Their current contact address. In many cases, particularly if they are also a CAPN author, this could be their PAUSE email address (AUTHOR@cpan.org), but equally could be a central email address they prefer to be contacted on. This then enables the tester to keep their contact information current, even if they change jobs. The mechanism behind the scenes now uses this, if available, as the primary addresss to display in the Find A Tester tool, but also now in the "raw" reports on the Reports website, and in the Reports Mailer tool that sends out the summary and report mails to authors.

There is still more to be changed to ensure that the contact address is considered the primary address, but hopefully it will get easier and more reliable to contact testers.

To find out how to update your contact address, please see tomorrow's post :)