It is with great pleasure that we officially announce a new sponsor for the CPAN Testers Project, ABC Startsiden.

ABC Startsiden AS owns, publishes and manages some of the most visited Norwegian web sites including an Internet portal (www.startsiden.no), an online newspaper (www.abcnyheter.no) and a TV-guide (www.meetv.no). ABC Startsiden AS is also Google"s largest search partner in Scandinavia.

ABC Startsiden have long been a long time supporter of Perl, CPAN and CPAN Testers, and we are delighted to have them as one our sponsors.

If you or your company would like to be a sponsor of the project, please get in touch. Alternatively, you can make donations via the CPAN Testers Fund, or Gratipay.

A very late summary, and that dispite one of my aims for this year was to get better at posing these on time :( As a consequence, if anyone is willing to help out with posting summaries, please get in touch.

For this post, I want to concentrate on promotion of CPAN Testers. Mark Keating wrote a very eloquent post regarding how testers themselves can promote CPAN Testers, with his post Smoke me an Onion baby. A few years ago, BinGOs and myself toyed with the idea of getting a T-shirt sorted to give out at YAPCs, promoting CPAN Testers. Unfortunately, we couldn't think of a suitable tag line and we're not graphic artists, so we never got anything sorted. In Mark's post he came up with some wonderful graphics to be used as badges for testers to promote their own involvement. If you like Mark's creations and wish to use them on your website, please get in touch and he'll provide copies for you to use. In the meantime watch out for stickers and badges at various future events.

Over the past few months, we have some interest from a few companies that have expressed a desire to support CPAN Testers. Both via monetary funding and spare capacity on servers. We are still in discussion with these companies, so hopefully we will have some new sponsors in the near future. We are always will to have more companies support us, as alhough individual funding is very much appreciated, we would like to see more corporate sponsorship to help raise our profile. If your company uses Perl, and makes use of CPAN Testers either directly or inderectly, and would be willing to help support the long term future of CPAN Testers, please get in touch.

Individual funding, as mentioned, is always very much appreciated, and if you would like to contribute in any way, you can make donations via the CPAN Testers Fund, or Gratipay. All proceeds are managed for us by the Enlightened Perl Organisation, who are a not-fot-profit organisation.

The reason for promotion, and requests for sponsorship, has come about as the Birmingham Perl Mongers' funding of the CPAN Testers servers comes to an end in September 2015, when we'll need to find other sources of funding for the current server. On top of this we have the Metabase server, which also requires funding. Sadly dedicated servers don't come cheap these days, so it roughly costs around £4200 (US$6280 or €5800) per year. Over the next six months we'll be doing as much as we can to raise the funding, but if you can help promote this to your employers that would be wonderful.

If you have any ideas to help promote CPAN Testers in other ways, please let me know and we'll see what we can do.

September featured two hot-topic discussions regarding CPAN Testers. 

The first was started by brian d foy, in a post about the effects of the development version of Test::More, which due to ongoing comment issues, were followed up separately. I see both sides of the argument, but I tend to side with brian. Testers need to take some responsibility when they are testing, particularly when it means testing releases, which may be experimental. However, it's tricky as there is no guarantee way of spotting the dependecy that is at fault. It could be the development release, but equally it could be another regular release. In fact this question has cropped up before where no development release was involved. To understand what is at fault requires human intervention. Programmatically we could try and guess, but it is likely we would get it wrong, just as much as we do now. As such I am looking at changing the Admin site to allow authors and testers to reallocate reports to another distribution. 

During the discussion ribasushi suggested expanding the report grades to handle these sorts of scenario. However, this doesn't get away from the fact that reports are attributed to the wrong distribution. It also confuses the issue for users and authors. The current system is very defined. It may be wrong on occasions, but that's something we can look at fixing. Expanding the grades is more likely going to detract the value of CPAN Testers. If we can improve the current analysis this is a much better result for all.

The second discussion, which started from a thread from August, was prompted by Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat around providing CPAN Testers machines available to test distributions on less popular OSes, so that we can ensure a decent amount of coverage for these OSes. The problem is that the CPAN Testers Fund doesn't currently have the funds available to support this. Its a great idea, and possibly something we can think about for the future, should funds ever be sufficient, but not right now.

If you have some free cycles on a less popular OS, and are willing to run a CPAN Testers client, please do so. As mentioned in the last post, there are several OSes we would love to see getting more test reports attributed to them. The OSes themselves are still widely used, and if you are having any problems setting up a client, please join the mailing list and ask for help and advice.

It was quite timely for BooK to mention the CPAN Testers Fund, as this year is the last year Birmingham Perl Mongers can fund the CPAN Testers server. After 8 years Birmingham Perl Mongers no longer have funds too cover the yearly costs of the reports server, and we will be completely reliant on the CPAN Testers Fund or gracious support from hosting companies to continue the service after September 2015.

I would like to take this moment to say thank you to the Birmingham Perl Mongers for the allowing me to support CPAN Testers for this long with their donations. Without their support, CPAN Testers would not have grown into the dynamic resource it is today. Thank you.

However, what happens next? As it currently stands the CPAN Testers will not be able to pay for the server next year. We could try and raise funds via crowdfunding sources, such as gratipay, but this very time consuming and realistically longer term we really need the support of major companies. Does your company use Perl, CPAN and/or CPAN Testers? Would they be willing to fund in part or full, the servers used to run the systems? If so, please get in touch. If you are a hosting company and would be willing to provide a server of our current spec or better, please get in touch and I can give you the specs for the current server and/or current costs to maintain the existing servers.

It would be a great shame to lose CPAN Testers, so if your company could help, please speak to your marketing department, owners or directors to see whether they are willing to donate. As a thank you, we do provide logos and links on all the primary CPAN Testers sites on the main servers, back to our sponsors websites and they will get thank yous in press releases on social media. Please get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions and hopefully we can keep CPAN Testers alive for many more years to come.

Apologies for posting this late, my laptop has sadly blown up, and I've had to rewrite my original post. More news next month.

August was quite an exhausting month, with several news worthy items. The YAPC::Europe 2012 conference, as mentioned last month, featured a few talks relating to testing, including my own looking specifically at the main components of CPAN Testers. I have often been asked about how the infrastructure of CPAN Testers works, and hopefully my talk gave some insight into that. The process diagram featured in the talk will be added to the CPAN-Testers distribution soon, and will be expanded at a later date to try and capture all the parts of the current CPAN Testers environments. CPAN Testers has grown substantially from its early beginnings, and its much easier to get involved. With so many parts to the whole system, it would be great to get more and more new contributors to the code base. See the Development site, which also needs updating now, for further links. It also intrigued me to see Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase in the (xvii) MetaCPAN favourites weekly report post. Hopefully whoever up-voted it, has been looking at contributing too :)

Kenichi Ishigaki was also at YAPC::Europe, and he previewed some of the forthcoming changes to CPANTS. He's done a lot of work behind the scenes getting the site back online. Working alongside his CPANAuthors site, the CPANTS site now looks a lot more modern, and hopefully will get used a little more again. While watching a twitter feed during the conference, I also happened to notice that Brian Cassidy posted about reaching the next goal for his CPAN::Changes Kwalitee Service. As of writing this, he needs another 12 distributions to pass the tests to reach 10,000 passes. While it's not a necessity to have your Changes files in a machine readable format, it is useful to have a convention that works for other uses. It highlights Kwalitee rather than Quality :)

In the last few weeks I've been cleaning up some of the code behind the CPAN Testers Reports site, including some requests posted in RT. As such, the distribution CPAN-Testers-WWW-Reports got a major update and now has better crawler detection, now displays the report counter headers for each distribution release and fixes the summary displays. The backend code has also had a bit of a clean up to improve some of the performance. In the coming weeks as promised some of the crawlers will be let back into the site again. Another big change has been to match the convention used elsewhere so that TRIAL distributions are now marked as development releases. I have also worked through old reports and changed the settings to reflect this too.

Proof, if proof were needed, why we need to move away from Amazon's SimpleDB, is the recent catch-up I started running recently, to collect all the missing reports from the last 3 months, that SimpleDB failed to extract from the Metabase. It's a constant source of confusion from testers as to why their reports are not appearing. The catch-up added 245989 reports to cpanstats database. That's over 80,000 reports that are currently being lost each month. For the money they charge every month, that's exceptionally poor service as far as I'm concerned.

Special thanks this month are reserved for Steffen Schwigon, aka renormalist, who has made a significant personal contribution to the CPAN Testers Fund. Steffen was one of the people who pushed us to get a CPAN Testers Fund set-up a few years ago, so we are delighted to see him come good on his promise to donate. If you'd like to make a personal contribution, please visit the donation page and contribute.

The CPAN Testers Fund is growing, and while we are grateful for every contribution, big or small, we'd love to see more, so we can help pay for all the running costs every year. Over the last month, Mark Keating had been throwing some ideas my way of how he could promote CPAN Testers, and at YAPC::Europe the light-bulb was most definitely on. Mark launched a corporate donation programme for CPAN Testers, whereby companies could contribute a regular monthly donation, rather than a big lump sum. Mark's idea is that if we could get 20 companies all contributing monthly about £20, that would be enough to cover our current expenses for a year. Taking the first step, ShadowCat are the first company to now make a regular donation to CPAN Testers. You and your company can too by simply visiting the CPAN Testers Fund page and setting up a regular recurring payment.

On a final note, I'd like to thank chromatic for mentioning CPAN Testers in a post about why he uses Perl testing. As chromatic notes, the Perl community's attitude to testing, and they have produced to support testing, has made Perl the success it is.

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce a new sponsor for the CPAN Testers Project. Webfusion have provided us with a Dedicated Server, for us to use with some of the supporting websites. As such, we will be using it for the Analytics and Matrix websites, as well as a secondary failover site for the Static Reports site.

Webfusion was established over 15 years ago, using their expertise to become one of the UK's largest web hosts. Specialising in delivering cost-effective, feature-rich hosting products to a diverse business orientated market and offer bespoke solutions tailored to your business requirements.

The Webfusion portfolio includes web hosting products, from Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers to flexible managed hosting solutions and high performance cloud hosting. All WebFusion web hosting solutions are designed to suit your business needs and help your business grow.

Webfusion are also hiring in the UK, and require Perl developers in both Bromsgrove and London.