>A lot of the heavy hitters are quite sensitive in this area. I am sure they have lots of code that is 90% good but they dont upload it because they are too busy to fix the other 10%. So they just use it themselves or abandon it because they now use a different technique.
>
>If we gave them a way of posting a contribution they could just delete their names out and write a brief note about the drawbacks of the code. We may spot someones style <g> but could never point the finger:)
>
>I have seen some threads where folks who have written great code get some insulting posts from people who just expect too much from the code. If there was some mechanism to spare them that I am sure they would leap at it.

I'd keep this sort of stuff in the regular downloads area, just have it marked as "unfinished", "abandoned", "lacks GUI", "not user friendly", "almost works", "needs inheritance (will someone finish this, I'm not using it)", "no I'm not maintaining this anymore". I know that having yet another area to search would simply make search time longer - when stuck with a problem, I usually search the FAQ, then the downloads, then the messages, then Wiki... who'd remember the dump?

What Michel could do, is to give the author an option to have his email address omitted from the file, so that no unwanted messages would start pouring in, and maybe another (he'll shoot me now for this) to pass the ownership of the file to another member, or even a group. Look at the move of Frx2wrd from single author into a collective effort - in a similar pattern, the dumped stuff may grow into big time stuff.