From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2004-09-09T07:51:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby-Nuby forum

On Thursday, September 9, 2004, 7:33:07 AM, Alexey wrote:

> 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 will, as opposed to, say, IRC, which is not really practical for me.

> 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".

Good idea.  It would be good to point out the difference between the
two fora, which to me is: in the "forum", repetitive questions are
encouraged as part of the learning process; in the mailing list, a
bit of prior research is appreciated.

> 2. When someone creates a new thread on ruby-forum, we will
> automatically mail notification to ruby-lang. 

Good idea.  Make it discreet.  Perhaps every forum page can just have
a small window listing the 10 most recent threads or something.

> 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 :)

Indeed.  If the forum gains critical mass, then there will be lots of
chatter, repeated questions, etc., which are not wanted on ruby-talk.
IMO, no form of automated bridging is desirable.

> 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.

Your time is almost certainly better spent fostering nubies than it is
building forum software.  But it's not mutually exclusive, I guess.

> To everybody who already participated in this thread: thanks!

Good luck!

Gavin