The symbolic links to the long usernames in this directory are an
historic accident. Please do not use them, look into

  CPAN/authors/00whois.{html,xml}

or if you prefer

  CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz

instead.

Long story: When CPAN turned out to be more of a success than expected
it had to be adjusted to permit more or less unlimited growth. An
appendage from that time is this directory. Biggest stupidity was to
allow 8bit characters in directory names without thinking about
character sets. Second biggest mistake was to fill up a single
directory with hundreds of entries. Now, they cannot be removed
because lots of people have made links to individual entries here. But
it's stupid to continue to maintain them because every click on this
directory entry costs a lot of time and with more authors it will
become more expensive to click on the directory listing. So please do
not rely on the contents of this directory

 *** except for the subdirectory "id". ***

Ignore everything else, expect it to go away in the future.

Thank you,
Your CPAN team

.