Ruby-Nuby forum

[Alexey Verkhovsky]

Dear fellow ruby-talkers,

I´d like to put forward an idea to create a forum for newcomers to Ruby.

There are:
* people who hesitate asking stupid questions on ruby-talk,
* people who don´t want to publish their email address for the spammers
to grab,
* people who don´t want to receive a hundred unrelated emails per day,
* people who don´t grok the ruby-lang archives browser (which is cool,
but somewhat cryptic),
* people who find that searches on ruby-lang archives produce a lot of
incomprehensible (for a nuby) information

These are the people whose needs we want to address with the forum.

The forum will have the following characteristics:

- anonymous posting allowed (registration is possible, but not
necessary)
- full-featured search engine
- edit/delete message functionality
- moderation by active participants
- email notification for new messages in selected thread, and for the
creation of new threads

The side benefit of this forum will be that its archives will contain
mostly beginner-level information, and therefore will be more useful to
the beginners than ruby-talk itself.

Hosting and domain registration will be taken care of in the next couple
of weeks.

We are asking for suggestions on the domain name (the current working
name is www.ruby-forum.org), and the choice of forum engine. If you want
to participate in the project, please email me off-list. If you think
this not a good idea at all, please tell us why. Any other contributions
are most welcome.

The forum engine must have most of the features listed above and be
written in Ruby, or have all features listed above and be portable to
Ruby (in which case we plan to use it as is initially, and then port it
to Ruby in the due course). Our hosting arrangement is a dedicated Linux
server, so we can host pretty much any server software in any language,
as long as it is open source and can live on a Linux.

Thank you all in advance.

Best regards,
Alexey Verkhovsky, on behalf of the initiative group (currently
consisting of my brother Dmitry and myself)

 

[James Britt]

Dear fellow ruby-talkers,

I´d like to put forward an idea to create a forum for newcomers to Ruby.

I think your intentions are notable, and I'm always glad to see someone
take initiative in spreading the word and helping people out. But I
believe this may be a mistake.

In the past (and, yes, things change), when there was discussion here on
creating a new mailing list for one thing or another, the general
consensus was that a) many people who have only a tangential interest
will not want to be bothered tracking yet another list, and b) most
topics often end up touching on items of interest to the community as a
whole, so they might as well happen here. Exceptions tend to be lists
or forums devoted to specific applications or segments of development,
such as the REXML or the ruby-doc lists.

My concern is that a Nuby forum will be frequented by Nubies, but not
the old hands who are the best ones to answer questions and guide
newcomers on style, technique, development rationale, and so on.

A web site that focused on providing Ruby newcomer resources would be
great but, ultimately, people learning Ruby have to simply learn to
speak up here.

But this sort of community segmentation *might* lead to a Nuby ghetto.

James

 

[Alexey Verkhovsky]

But this sort of community segmentation *might* lead to a Nuby ghetto.

I recognized the danger that you describe, and was thinking to address
it by:

(a) cross-posting questions that cannot be answered on the nuby forum to
ruby-talk, then cross-posting digested answers back to the forum.

(b) encouraging people on the forum to join ruby-talk and ask the
not-so-trivial questions there.

I've "agitated" 3-4 guys to start learning Ruby in the last couple of
months, and all had problems with ruby-talk as described in the original
email.

Alex

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

I recognized the danger that you describe, and was thinking to address
it by:

(a) cross-posting questions that cannot be answered on the nuby forum to
ruby-talk, then cross-posting digested answers back to the forum.

(b) encouraging people on the forum to join ruby-talk and ask the
not-so-trivial questions there.

I've "agitated" 3-4 guys to start learning Ruby in the last couple of
months, and all had problems with ruby-talk as described in the original
email.

It seems like you have enough of an idea of what's going on in
newbie-land, so I think it's a good idea.

What would be nice is a regular (fortnightly?) post to ruby-talk which
summarised activity in the forum. It's only a one-way bridge between the
communities, but it keeps the "old hands" informed, should there be a need
for expert comment.

That's obviously a manual effort, but one I'm sure you'll agree would be
worthwhile.

Cheers,
Gavin

 

[David Ross]

yes interesting, a rehash of what goes on would be
nice. Good idea gavin I think the new ruby
programmer forum would be a good idea.

--David Ross

It seems like you have enough of an idea of what's
going on in
newbie-land, so I think it's a good idea.

What would be nice is a regular (fortnightly?) post
to ruby-talk which
summarised activity in the forum. It's only a
one-way bridge between the
communities, but it keeps the "old hands" informed,
should there be a need
for expert comment.

That's obviously a manual effort, but one I'm sure
you'll agree would be
worthwhile.

Cheers,
Gavin

__________________________________
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[Randy W. Sims]

Dear fellow ruby-talkers,

I´d like to put forward an idea to create a forum for newcomers to Ruby.

I love the idea of a beginners forum, but I *hate* web forums.
Newsgroups and mailing list are a much better medium because discussions
are threaded and you can easily see what you've read. If you do chose a
web forum, please consider as a requirement one that has a decent mail
gateway.

The forum engine must have most of the features listed above and be
written in Ruby, or have all features listed above and be portable to
Ruby (in which case we plan to use it as is initially, and then port it
to Ruby in the due course).

Err, why does it matter what language it's written in? As long as it's
functional and meets requirements, use it.

Looking forward to seeing this happen,

Randy.

 

[Hal Fulton]

I've "agitated" 3-4 guys to start learning Ruby in the last couple of
months, and all had problems with ruby-talk as described in the original
email.

No one should feel intimidated to speak up on ruby-talk. If you've seen
some of the dross that gets posted here, you'll know it's a very open
community.


Hal

 

[Alexey Verkhovsky]

I love the idea of a beginners forum, but I *hate* web forums.
Newsgroups and mailing list are a much better medium because discussions
are threaded and you can easily see what you've read.

My initial post argues that mailing lists are not a better medium in
case of beginners.

If you do chose a
web forum, please consider as a requirement one that has a decent mail
gateway. Absolutely.

Err, why does it matter what language it's written in? As long as it's
functional and meets requirements, use it.

Beginners forum for Ruby written in (say) Perl is bad publicity More
seriously, we'll need to customize it, in which case we want it to be a
Ruby project.

Regards,
Alex

 

[Robert Klemme]

Hi Alexey,

although I can understand your motivation, I'd vote against this. There
is not too much traffic here that you won't be able to filter the
interesting things out IMHO. Some other considerations:

Dear fellow ruby-talkers,

I´d like to put forward an idea to create a forum for newcomers to Ruby.

There are:
* people who hesitate asking stupid questions on ruby-talk,

Well, there are two options (a bit oversimplified):

1. There are only nubys in the new forum. In that case people might not
hesistate to post but they might not get the best answers.

2. There are also those folks with quite some experience on the nuby
forum. In that case, nubys might hesistate in the same way as they do
now.

So, what advantage would be there in splitting the community - which isn't
too big at the moment? I personally believe that people should overcome
their hesistations if they want something in return. IMHO it's a good
training for life in general. Apart from that, I know forums that are far
more hostile than ruby-talk/clr.

* people who don´t want to publish their email address for the spammers
to grab,

It's easy and cheap to set up a second mail account that can be used for
this. If you read via news, you'll even never need to access this mail
account.

* people who don´t want to receive a hundred unrelated emails per day,

Again, it's quite easy to filter when you read news.

* people who don´t grok the ruby-lang archives browser (which is cool,
but somewhat cryptic),

Yes, definitely.

* people who find that searches on ruby-lang archives produce a lot of
incomprehensible (for a nuby) information

You can always use Google's group search as an alternative.

These are the people whose needs we want to address with the forum.

The forum will have the following characteristics:

- anonymous posting allowed (registration is possible, but not
necessary)
- full-featured search engine
- edit/delete message functionality

Why would you want to modify messages after they were posted? That can
lead to threads difficult to follow.

- moderation by active participants
- email notification for new messages in selected thread, and for the
creation of new threads

The side benefit of this forum will be that its archives will contain
mostly beginner-level information, and therefore will be more useful to
the beginners than ruby-talk itself.

Yeah, true.

Hosting and domain registration will be taken care of in the next couple
of weeks.

So it's decided already?

Kind regards

robert

 

[Alexey Verkhovsky]

2. There are also those folks with quite some experience on the nuby
forum. In that case, nubys might hesistate in the same way as they do
now.

That's where the cross-posting comes in. The role of ruby-talk in this
picture will be kind of a second-tier support. As Gavin wrote, it's a
manual effort, but worthwhile.

So it's decided already?

Not yet. We will go ahead if most of the community here is in favor of
it and the forum will be referred from www.ruby-lang.org. There is no
value in creating a BBS that nobody knows about

Alex

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

That's where the cross-posting comes in. The role of ruby-talk in this
picture will be kind of a second-tier support. As Gavin wrote, it's a
manual effort, but worthwhile.

Not yet. We will go ahead if most of the community here is in favor of
it and the forum will be referred from www.ruby-lang.org. There is no
value in creating a BBS that nobody knows about

Like James B. and Robert K., I would respectfully advise against doing
this at all.

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 know that ruby-talk has changed
in some ways over the years (bigger, somewhat more troll-prone, etc.),
but I'd really like to think that people can still talk about Ruby
at any level here.

I don't think the bi-weekly cross-posting would help at all. I notice
that Gavin's description of it includes reference to "the communities"
(plural), which is probably an accurate description of how it would be
but a really sad state of things to contemplate.

There are also technical issues, and it's not just a matter of simple
things vs. difficult things. The hardest thing in Ruby, sometimes, is
perceiving the simplicity that's available to you. For example, many
Ruby beginners go through a phase of writing this:

my_array.each {|e| puts e}

instead of

puts my_array

and so on. And some things are simple, once you learn them, but
really have to be learned and grasped. For example:

a = "hi"
b = a
a << " there"
puts a # hi there
puts b # hi there

# but...

x = 1
y = x
x += 1
puts x # 2
puts y # 1

Anyway -- I would urge you and your colleagues to join us here, and
also for interactive help visit #ruby-lang on irc.freenode.org.


David

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Dear fellow ruby-talkers,

I´d like to put forward an idea to create a forum for newcomers to
Ruby.

This is a topic very close to my interests. I've come here very
recently from Perl land, where I spent years on the Perl Beginner's
mailing list (first as a beginner and later helping beginners).

I'll admit that at first, I missed my mailing list a lot. Ruby Talk is
different. Here all aspects of the language are discussed. While
that's not what I was originally after, it seems to be growing on me.
It makes me aware of more than just the syntax of a language and that's
probably a good thing.

So, I'm "on the fence" about whether it should all be funneled through
here or if a place for "Nubys" is a good idea.

Since you did ask for comments though, I'll give mine...

There are:
* people who hesitate asking stupid questions on ruby-talk,

Stomp this behavior out of your friends! Part of using an Open
Source language is slipping into the community. A very important part,
I think.

Posters have been very open and responsive to my code questions over
the last two weeks.

* people who don´t want to publish their email address for the spammers
to grab,

Forums are scanned for addresses too. I see that you intend to allow
anonymous posting, but still this is an almost silly complaint
nowadays. It happens everywhere and there are numerous options to
control it.

* people who don´t want to receive a hundred unrelated emails per day,

Yes, Ruby Talk is pretty high traffic, I agree. Again, I'm starting to
believe the "unrelated email" is a good thing, but I understand this
complaint.

* people who don´t grok the ruby-lang archives browser (which is cool,
but somewhat cryptic),

Sadly, yes. Sue me, but I'm not found of them.

Instead, use Google Groups to search the newsgroup side.

* people who find that searches on ruby-lang archives produce a lot of
incomprehensible (for a nuby) information

Probably true.

These are the people whose needs we want to address with the forum.

The forum will have the following characteristics:

- anonymous posting allowed (registration is possible, but not
necessary)
- full-featured search engine

Both nice.

- edit/delete message functionality

I too am not found of "editing" forum posts. It often leads to replies
to non-existent information. I feel one of the primary goals of a Nuby
forum should be readability, so I would not go this way.

- moderation by active participants

I'm not sure what you mean here. I'm sure you don't mean to go all the
way to Slashdot moderation and meta-moderation, but any steps in that
direction seem overkill for a Nuby forum to me. I would vote for
traditional, boring moderators. Keep it simple.

- email notification for new messages in selected thread, and for the
creation of new threads

Always nice.

I would add:

- Forum system slanted towards a question/answer format. Maybe when a
question is first asked mark it with a ??? or similar label. Then
allow the asker and or moderators to switch it to SOLVED, when they
feel it has been. This improves both Nuby searching for the same
answer and experts monitoring knowing where their help is needed. I'm
sure other steps could be taken along these lines and you did say you
wanted to hack the forum software.

- I'm also very found of quiz material as a teaching tool for Nubys, so
I would add a quiz feature. Ask a question, maybe weekly. Allow
people to post their answers, but build in some form of protection, so
people don't see the answers before they give it a go themselves. Then
post a summary, just before the next quiz. I'm thinking of questions
along the lines of C++'s Guru of the Week. However, if you slant the
format towards something similar to TopCoder (make a method with this
signature that returns this), you can even automate testing. Just a
thought to play with a little...

The side benefit of this forum will be that its archives will contain
mostly beginner-level information, and therefore will be more useful to
the beginners than ruby-talk itself.

Hosting and domain registration will be taken care of in the next
couple
of weeks.

We are asking for suggestions on the domain name (the current working
name is www.ruby-forum.org), and the choice of forum engine.

I don't like the name choice. It doesn't convey what it is. Ruby
Nubys need to look at the name and go, "Hey, that's for me!"

If you want to participate in the project, please email me off-list.

I may be interested in helping. Let's see how the discussion plays out
and give me some time to think on it...

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II

 

[James Edward Gray II]

My concern is that a Nuby forum will be frequented by Nubies, but not
the old hands who are the best ones to answer questions and guide
newcomers on style, technique, development rationale, and so on.

I can't speak with authority here, but it's certainly not this way in
Perl land. Many experts track Perl Beginners and/or Perl Monks. While
there is some bad advice given, it's generally corrected quickly.

Don't underestimate the value for even intermediate level programmers
either. You can learn a lot from teaching.

Again, this isn't so much my prediction, just what I've observed
elsewhere.

James Edward Gray II

 

[James Edward Gray II]

I love the idea of a beginners forum, but I *hate* web forums.
Newsgroups and mailing list are a much better medium because
discussions are threaded and you can easily see what you've read. If
you do chose a web forum, please consider as a requirement one that
has a decent mail gateway.

I see a friendly face from Perl Beginners. (Hello Randy! )

I'm with Randy, I'm a mail and news fan. Others did like Perl Monks
though, so I guess it takes all kinds.

I think a gateway is a sensational idea.

James Edward Gray II

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

I can't speak with authority here, but it's certainly not this way in
Perl land. Many experts track Perl Beginners and/or Perl Monks. While
there is some bad advice given, it's generally corrected quickly.

Ultimately, if people want to start a beginners' forum, then they
will. Part of growing in size as a community is that we can't try to
agree on everything before anyone does anything.

I think it's too bad, though. I've always liked the fact that we
don't go in for layering and hierarchies of users; everyone just meets
(electronically or otherwise) and does stuff. I certainly believe
that Perl experts track the beginners, monks, etc.... and I guess
that's better than not tracking them, but I don't see that whole
culture of stratification as necessary for Ruby or worthy of
emulation in the first place.

But, like I said, we can't all agree on every step.


David

 

[Brian Schroeder]

Dear fellow ruby-talkers,

I´d like to put forward an idea to create a forum for newcomers to
Ruby.

[...]
- Forum system slanted towards a question/answer format. Maybe when a
question is first asked mark it with a ??? or similar label. Then
allow the asker and or moderators to switch it to SOLVED, when they
feel it has been. This improves both Nuby searching for the same
answer and experts monitoring knowing where their help is needed. I'm
sure other steps could be taken along these lines and you did say you
wanted to hack the forum software.

I also don't like splitting forums too much, but the above seems a good
idea to me. It is not neccessary to restrict this to nubys, but something
like answers.google.com without the monetary aspect and for ruby could
develop to a valuable ruby resource, equally usefull for nubys and nsnys
(not so nubys).

I think a decent search engine would make it usefull for people of all
level of experience.

Then you could add some anwer ranking possibilities and I think an
interesting book could evolve. Somehow like "ruby-cookbook" but much
bigger.

- I'm also very found of quiz material as a teaching tool for Nubys, so
I would add a quiz feature. Ask a question, maybe weekly. Allow
people to post their answers, but build in some form of protection, so
people don't see the answers before they give it a go themselves. Then
post a summary, just before the next quiz. I'm thinking of questions
along the lines of C++'s Guru of the Week. However, if you slant the
format towards something similar to TopCoder (make a method with this
signature that returns this), you can even automate testing. Just a
thought to play with a little...

Quizes are nice?
(What is the plural of quiz?)

regards,

Brian

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Ultimately, if people want to start a beginners' forum, then they
will. Part of growing in size as a community is that we can't try to
agree on everything before anyone does anything.

I think it's too bad, though. I've always liked the fact that we
don't go in for layering and hierarchies of users; everyone just meets
(electronically or otherwise) and does stuff. I certainly believe
that Perl experts track the beginners, monks, etc.... and I guess
that's better than not tracking them, but I don't see that whole
culture of stratification as necessary for Ruby or worthy of
emulation in the first place.

But, like I said, we can't all agree on every step.

While I appreciate what you're saying here, I don't find it as negative
as you do. Nubies aren't trying to form their own community because
they don't want to have anything to do with the status quo. They just
want a comfortable place to question and learn. For me, Ruby Talk is
filling that need, but for others it may not be. The desire to find
something that does is a noble quest, I think. Again, I'm not for any
kind of segregation in the Ruby community, but I think you're painting
a "Nuby Safe Place" in an unfair light.

Food for thought: Why don't we school 12th graders in the same room at
the same time as 1st graders?

James Edward Gray II

P.S. And our opinion was asked for first. Isn't that what you always
hope for out of your children?

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

Food for thought: Why don't we school 12th graders in the same room at
the same time as 1st graders?

Well, as a college professor, I can testify to sometimes feeling that
we school kindergarteners and upper-level grad students in the same
room, even though all my students are actually undergraduates

In any case, as I said, I'm not big on stratification where it isn't
necessary. (It's necessary in the case of the formal education of 17-
vs. 6-year-olds.) But if you think it will help you learn Ruby, then
you should try it; but keep in mind that many people have said that
they think that Ruby's greatest strength is its community. So don't
be a stranger


David

 

[Bill Guindon]

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.

 

[James Britt]

Food for thought: Why don't we school 12th graders in the same room at
the same time as 1st graders?

Various reasons, I'm sure, though none that have to do with this list or
community. This is not a class room.

If I were to make an analogy with school, though, I would say that this
list is more like a school cafeteria. Everyone in the same place,
intermingling as they see fit, most people trying not to ostracize anyone.

James