From: Bill Guindon <agorilla@...>
Date: 2004-09-08T00:44:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby-Nuby forum

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 20:48:00 +0900, David A. Black <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:

> In fact, it's a pretty major disappointment to me that nubies would
> feel this fear of ruby-talk.  I believe that's a very new phenomenon,
> and I'd encourage all of you to fight through it.  It sounds like
> you're talking about people with genuine interest in Ruby (not skript
> kiddies), and in nearly four years here I've never seen any indication
> that such people are not welcome.

I think 'fear' might be too strong a word.  More like 'shy', at least
at first, and I think that would apply even more to those who are
experienced programmers with an aversion to 'showing their ignorance'
publicly (include me in that group).
 
> Anyway -- I would urge you and your colleagues to join us here, and
> also for interactive help visit #ruby-lang on irc.freenode.org.
 
Couldn't agree more.  #ruby-lang has been a great help for me, and
it's softened the blow a bit.  Personally, I felt more comfortable
asking stupid questions there.  Not sure why, perhaps because of the
smaller community, the faster response, or the transient nature (my
current ignorance isn't recorded for posterity).  I imagine it's some
mix of those.  However, irc is not for everyone, and it commonly has a
negative image thx to 'generation 1337' (c).

Another great resource for beginners is the RubyGarden Wiki.  I'll
admit, it's sometimes very tough to find what I'm looking for there,
but there are a lot of gems there, and they're worth digging for.

That said...

I do see forums as a potentially useful tool, in fact, the first thing
I looked for was a Ruby forum, and found none.  I'd love to see one
for Ruby, but don't see why it should be targeted/limited to Nuby's. 
It's a tough crowd to target, they won't know about it, and by the
time they find out, they may reject the label.   <sarcasm> How would
you restrict it any way?  would you filter out references to 'lambda',
'binding', 'klass', etc? `</sarcasm>

Forums add a couple of things that can't be easily done with a mailing list:
Moderation - somebody to weed the gems from the 'ore'
Categories - gives a quick guide to old content - let's you focus on
certain topics.
Stickies - hot topics, faq's, commonly needed info tends to get
'fixed' in place at user request.

I'll even throw in a yes vote for editing.  When used intelligently,
the pros outweigh the cons.  ie: when applied to 'stickies', editing
lets you do a top page or two per category where the first message is
always up to date.  Gives you one stop shopping for the current status
of a topic.

Overall, I tend to think that this community would play well together
in forum mode.

-- 
Bill Guindon (aka aGorilla)