Forum: Ruby Gateway Shutting Down

Rubyists:

We have long maintained a gateway between the comp.lang.ruby Usenet
group and the Ruby Talk mailing list.  This gateway shuttles most
messages back and forth between these two groups.

When our community was young, that was very important for keeping us
together.  Especially since we had small memberships count early on.

Our community has grown beyond this phase.  We have a ton of groups
and have long since split into our separate domains.

I have maintained the most recent incarnation of the gateway for years
now, but it was running on the server of a company I don't even work
for anymore.  I needed to find it a new home, but I really don't think
it's worth the resources to maintain anymore.  Given that, I'm
retiring as the gateway maintainer today and the gateway is shutting
down.

Again, I just don't feel we need it anymore.  If you disagree, the
code is publicly available and you are welcome to devote your own
resources to the project.  (Please, think hard before you reinstate it
though.  There are consequences to having it.)

Thanks for understanding.

James Edward Gray II

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 3:17 PM, James Gray <james@graysoftinc.com> 
wrote:
> Given that, I'm retiring as the gateway maintainer today and the gateway is 
shutting
> down.

It should be offline now.

James Edward Gray II

Thank you for all of your hard work...
I hope that I can return the favor someday...
Good luck in your next endevor
Pat

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Gray" <james@graysoftinc.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 4:17 PM
Subject: Gateway Shutting Down

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:47 AM, James Gray <james@graysoftinc.com> 
wrote:
> I have maintained the most recent incarnation of the gateway for years
> now, but it was running on the server of a company I don't even work
> for anymore. I needed to find it a new home, but I really don't think
> it's worth the resources to maintain anymore. Given that, I'm
> retiring as the gateway maintainer today and the gateway is shutting
> down.

Thanks for your work in keeping it up and running. Also, as a
practical matter, note that we can now freely flag spam in our webmail
clients without getting the gateway blacklisted.

martin

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 12:18 AM, Martin DeMello
<martindemello@gmail.com> wrote:
> clients without getting the gateway blacklisted.
James, thank you for the gateway maintenance through past years!  I
can't spare you the bit of nitpicking that a larger warning time would
have allowed for a smoother transfer - in case the community wants it
and can provide the resources. ;-)

Me personally am a fan of the gateway.  Who else?

Kind regards

robert

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Robert Klemme
<shortcutter@googlemail.com>wrote:

> >
>
> Kind regards
>
> robert
>
> --
> remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/
>
>
I think that as noble as it is to hope people can be mature enough to 
not
reply to emalis with subjects like "MIDASWAD", that they just can't pull 
it
off.

As one who has been feeling overwhelmed by the trolling, both here, and 
on
the Linked In forums (different troll, slightly more vitriolic, not 
quite as
much of a drain, but still astoundingly obnoxious), I'm appreciative of 
the
big guns. I literally mark the emails as read without even opening them,
now. And even seeing them come into my inbox makes me cringe.

I find it so disillusioning to watch people talking about how they're 
not
going to talk it.

Ilias has had a few good points, but is simply not worth the overhead. 
Any
benefit that comes from having him post here is drowned out a thousand 
times
by the drawbacks of having him post here.

On Jun 22, 2011, at 02:09 , Robert Klemme wrote:

> Me personally am a fan of the gateway.  Who else?

I'm afraid the numbers just don't bear out. You only posted once via 
usenet over the last week (out of 8 posts). :P

The numbers were even worse than I thought because I originally included 
a bunch of old mail in my analysis that I'd flagged to save. After 
filtering those out we have:

 2.5% =   9 posts     from usenet not from ilias
15.3% =  56 posts     from usenet     from ilias
82.2% = 302 posts not from usenet not from ilias
 0.0% =   0 posts not from usenet     from ilias !!!

1.6% of our posting population is posting 15.3% of all posts and history 
shows that he only gets more prolific with time. Why should one guy have 
such a negative impact through a medium we can't control? And that's 
only looking at the one guy, not the responses that only occurred 
because of him.

I suspect that things will normalize very quickly now and we can get 
back to work.

As an aside, I'd like to say that I deeply thank James for his efforts 
but that I also don't think James really owes us anything given the fact 
that this was a volunteer effort and being done on ex-company resources. 
I especially don't think he owes us anything given the current 
situation. It has gotten out of hand and despite repeated attempts by 
James, myself, and others to try to quell the masses (admittedly, via 
very different approaches). We're way past tribe size. I'm afraid it 
doesn't work at this scale.

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 12:39 PM, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> 
wrote:
>
> On Jun 22, 2011, at 02:09 , Robert Klemme wrote:
>
>> Me personally am a fan of the gateway. Who else?
>
> I'm afraid the numbers just don't bear out. You only posted once via usenet over 
the last week (out of 8 posts). :P

Now you only need to explain why number of postings via a particular
channel is a valid measure of "being fan of the gateway". :-)

> We're way past tribe size. I'm afraid it doesn't work at this scale.

I am not sure I understand this.  Do you mean issues of volume and
performance?  Or is there something else caused by the size of the
community which makes the gateway concept break?

Kind regards

robert

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Robert Klemme
<shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Or is there something else caused by the size of the
> community which makes the gateway concept break?

The gateway was formed to join the then two small online Ruby
communities into one.  Today there are tons of sub-communities.  What
makes those two special?  How come we don't link in 50 more?  My
opinion is because we've grown beyond the size where that is needed.

James Edward Gray II

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:44 PM, James Gray <james@graysoftinc.com> 
wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Robert Klemme
> <shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Or is there something else caused by the size of the
>> community which makes the gateway concept break?
>
> The gateway was formed to join the then two small online Ruby
> communities into one. Today there are tons of sub-communities. What
> makes those two special? How come we don't link in 50 more? My
> opinion is because we've grown beyond the size where that is needed.

Thanks for clarifying, James!  Now I get the point - and I understand
why I didn't get it earlier: I never viewed ruby-talk and c.l.r as
separate communities - they were all one community for me all the
time.  (Now, in hindsight, that tells us something about the good
quality of the gateway, doesn't it?)  That also explains why the cut
feels like a community split for me.  Well, we'll see how matters
evolve.

Kind regards

robert

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Robert Klemme
<shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:
> That also explains why the cut
> feels like a community split for me. Well, we'll see how matters
> evolve.

Considering the ridiculously low numbers of messages from usenet: *Is*
there a clr community to speak of?

--
Phillip Gawlowski

A method of solution is perfect if we can forsee from the start,
and even prove, that following that method we shall attain our aim.
       -- Leibnitz

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 4:17 PM, James Gray <james@graysoftinc.com> 
wrote:
> and have long since split into our separate domains.
Very true.

>
> I have maintained the most recent incarnation of the gateway for years
> now, but it was running on the server of a company I don't even work
> for anymore. I needed to find it a new home, but I really don't think
> it's worth the resources to maintain anymore. Given that, I'm
> retiring as the gateway maintainer today and the gateway is shutting
> down.

First, thanks very very much for looking after the gateway.  It's one
of those tasks for which there tended to be little recognition or
appreciation (mostly because it worked really well so few people
thought about it, so props there).

Second, this makes perfect sense.    There are so many cliques and
groups and subcultures that there's no longer any plausible defense of
anything to be *the* info source for *the* Ruby community.

There are lots of Ruby communities, and lots of ways to get
information abut them.

Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't.  People just need to
find their own way.

Now if only we could get people to stop referring to *the* Ruby 
community ....

James Britt