From: Alexey Verkhovsky Date: 2004-09-09T06:33:07+09:00 Subject: Ruby-Nuby forum Hi all! Results of our little opinion poll so far: 9 people are for, 5 are against, 2 are for only if the gateway feature is implemented (i.e., filtering the traffic from the forum to ruby-talk and back) As I understand, the main reason why people vote against it is that community is friendly enough to nubies as is and not big enough to justify splitting. And I agree with both of these statements. However, splitting the community is NOT the purpose. The purpose is to lower the entry barrier for uncommitted beginners (subscribing to a mail-list with 100 mails/day traffic is commitment). As people become more committed to Ruby, we will try to convince them to join ruby-talk. [To David Black: "uncommitted beginners" may well include "script-kiddies". They grow up, too.] Since enough people seem to support the idea, we are going ahead with it. By the way, gentlemen, I hope all of you who said "go for it" will help answer stupid questions on the forum :) I think, it is important to address the concerns of those who voted against the forum. At present, I have only a couple of ideas, maybe somebody will have more: 1. Somewhere on a visible place there will be a statement along the lines of "Ruby-talk mailing list is the best place to discuss Ruby programming. Subscribe to ruby-talk today". 2. When someone creates a new thread on ruby-forum, we will automatically mail notification to ruby-lang. I am not very comfortable with the thought of building a two-way communication with ruby-talk. To be more precise, I am not confident in our ability to implement it well. Bugs in such a thing would be HUGELY embarassing :) So far, I haven't found a decent forum implementation in Ruby (a couple of simple BBSes are available on RubyForge, but nothing really full-featured). Therefore, we will probably host it on phpGroup for now (like this Ruby forum in Deutsch: http://www.rubyforen.de/index.php). I have asked for a RubyForge project to do Ruby implementation of the forum software. We are thinking to do it on Rails. If anyone wants to take part in the development, please mail me off list. To everybody who already participated in this thread: thanks! Best regards, Alexey Verkhovsky