From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-05-16T02:20:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby community website / forum

On 5/15/06, John Gabriele <jmg3000@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/15/06, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 5/6/06, John Gabriele <jmg3000@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Perlmonks really is a very useful site that's much more than a
>>> mailing list. I agree that it'd be great for the Ruby community to
>>> have a site like it.
>>>
>>> Dunno if I'd call it RubyNuns though. ;)
>> I see no value in this.
>>
>> Literally, none.
>>
>> I *would* like to see RubyGarden pick up a bit more, but the
>> principals involved have been very busy, partially with fixing the
>> RubyGarden Wiki.
> No one said RubyGarden couldn't be that site, but AFAICT there's no
> forum at RubyGarden.

This is a good thing. Forums are the lowest denominator of quality,
IMO&E.

> Really, it's all about folks coming forward and putting in the work to
> either create a "RubyMonks" or else, as you seem to be suggesting,
> adding a forum to RubyGarden with some PerlMonks-like functionality.

No, I'm not suggesting any such thing. I don't see any reason for a
forum.

Let me be a little more clear: I will almost certainly not participate
in a web-based forum that adds little to no value to the Ruby community,
as ruby-forum has definitely demonstrated with its mirror. (I applaud
the effort behind ruby-forum and think that the mailing-list link is
interesting, but ultimately useless because of the high number of
nonsensical and lazy posts that come from it.)

I'm not going to speak for anyone else, but I suspect that a *lot* of
people are like me on this: I don't have time. I barely have time to
read the Ruby blogs and keep up with ruby-talk in any case.

Without guaranteeing a high level of participation from active
high-knowledge members of the community, including the Japanese
community, a PerlMonks-alike is doomed to failure. Not that I think that
PerlMonks is even remotely worth emulating. The postings on the first
page as I look now are spectacularly uninteresting and don't offer
anything that hasn't been asked and answered elsewhere better. The UI is
crap (the /. UI might be better, but that's a close call). It offers
absolutely nothing that could not be done better with a mailing list and
a wiki.

There are, IMO, far better projects to spend your time on than Yet
Another Useless Web-Forum For A Community That Doesn't Need One. Some of
these have fortunately been proposed as Summer of Code projects, so they
may happen sooner rather than later.

> BTW, I've noticed that the Ruby wiki there has been really hammered
> with spam lately.

And this is being fixed (see above). There's a test wiki on RubyGarden's
site at port 3000 that's worth looking at.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca