This site tracks bugs in every distribution released through CPAN.
See the quick usage guidelines if you want to know how to use this site. These guidelines are also on the login page.
No. They are not. Unless you have an outside contractual relationship with a maintainer, you need to assume that they are a volunteer. Telling them they "must" do something is impolite and counterproductive.
In general, we discourage bug reports against older versions of modules other than for historical reporting purposes (i.e. resolved immediately upon report with a note that it's been tested and found to work in the current version.)
If a bug exists in the current CPAN version of a module, please do report the bug.
Sure it can, but that does not disable the module's RT queue and users can still create tickets on rt.cpan.org.
All parts used to build this service are open source software. The core is Request Tracker from Best Practical Solutions. Everything else is either an extension for this site or a module from the CPAN.
rt.cpan.org has some customizations which tie it to a particular RT version; at this moment (March 2013) it's RT 4.0.
You can explore the source code by checking out the repository:
git clone git://github.com/bestpractical/rt-extension-rt_cpan_org.git
If you have any questions about rt.cpan.org, feel free to send us mail and we'll do our best to get back to you.