I think I see a little class separation going on here. I'm a newbie to
Ruby. I'm not incompetent, but I do often ask question that "could be
answered with a 3 second Google search"... if I only knew what on earth
I was searching for. It may be obvious to one person, but otherworldly
to someone who's just encountering a gotcha for the first time.
I've really loved ruby-forum.com since I started using it. People are
VERY friendly, understanding, patient, and have all the answers to all
my questions. Excellent community, excellent dialog.
How about just requiring users to register before they can post to
ruby-talk? AFAICS, everyone can post ahead right now.
I do *not* think that it is sufficiently clear; someone noted that
they were surprised to learn that the forum was actually tied to a
mailing list *in this very thread*.
That was me. After my first couple of posts, I thought it prudent to
treat this forum like a mailing list. Everyone else seemed to. It would
at least help somewhat if it was insinuated somewhere on the forum that
this is cross-posted to a mailing list.
The web interface is reducing the quality of discussion dramatically,
and merely increasing the warning level is not going to help that.
Help? Yes it would. Solve? Well...
The style of discussion on fora is too radically different for the way
that ruby-talk is presented on ruby-forum. Something different needs
to be done, because what exists is detrimental to the community.
Is it really detrimental?
I don't believe anyone gets paid to respond to ruby-talk so increase in noise makes it much more likely that mails will be ignored.
I think I see a little class separation going on here. I'm a newbie to
Ruby. I'm not incompetent, but I do often ask question that "could be
answered with a 3 second Google search"... if I only knew what on earth
I was searching for. It may be obvious to one person, but otherworldly
to someone who's just encountering a gotcha for the first time.
Subscribing to a mailing list takes work and causes you to get mail you might otherwise not want. Posting on ruby-forum takes much less effort, you don't need to log in and it won't clog up your inbox. The difference between the two causes people who go the mailing list route to do a more exhaustive search.
···
On May 3, 2006, at 1:03 PM, Nathan Olberding wrote:
--
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://blog.segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant
I must say, this is quite disturbing [for me]. I think we forum users need to take action now. Like I said, I believe ruby-forum.com is abandoned (would the administrator please make some comments?).
I'm thinking perhaps I am going to stop using it, since it is borderline useless if we can't assume it is a consistent mirror in both directions.
Funny enough, you didn't care notifying me about the problem, as did nobody else. The gateway would have been up again in no time.
Thanks Andreas. I looked on the site for a contact, but must have missed it.
I do appreciate the Ruby Forum and I think it's a good resource for people.
> I think I see a little class separation going on here. I'm a newbie to
> Ruby. I'm not incompetent, but I do often ask question that "could be
> answered with a 3 second Google search"... if I only knew what on earth
> I was searching for. It may be obvious to one person, but otherworldly
> to someone who's just encountering a gotcha for the first time.
>
> I've really loved ruby-forum.com since I started using it. People are
> VERY friendly, understanding, patient, and have all the answers to all
> my questions. Excellent community, excellent dialog.
How about just requiring users to register before they can post to
ruby-talk? AFAICS, everyone can post ahead right now.
Yep, including guests, which leads to this nonsense:
···
On 5/3/06, Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com> wrote:
Funny enough, you didn't care notifying me about the problem, as did
nobody else. The gateway would have been up again in no time.
Andreas: I didn't mean to irk you with my behaviour. Rest assured
you'll hear from me quickly if anything like this ever happens again.
Christian Neukirchen wrote:
How about just requiring users to register before they can post to
ruby-talk? AFAICS, everyone can post ahead right now.
Sounds good to me.
···
---
I'm all for keeping low-quality posts out of ruby-talk. I wouldn't want
to be in the judgement seat deciding which are good or bad, though.
Personally, I would rather not see the forum mirror for ruby-talk
disappear. I have always preferred forums over mailing lists and
newsgroups (though my stance has softened lately with the advent of
GMail which displays threads rather nicely).
I've been on more than a few forums in my life, and the fact is (based
on my experience) postings are not really bad just because they're done
on a forum versus a mailing list. There are juvenile forums, and there
are top-notch forums.
My opinion is that we should just keep putting in little strictures and
making little adjustments until we get to some reasonable state of
affairs. Requiring forum registration to post to ruby-talk would be a
good start, I think.
Who knows, maybe we could also have moderation for ruby-forum, to act as
a bit of a pre-ruby-talk sieve.
Some extra warning text about the mirror-ness might help, too.
