Re-post: [Mailing list -> ruby-forum.com broken?]

justincollins · May 2, 2006, 9:25pm

I posted this on the mailing list, but obviously that didn’t get
duplicated to the forum Sorry to those on the mailing list who have
to see this twice:

It looks like messages sent to the mailing list are not being propagated
to the ruby-forum.com.

Some examples:
“Mixin Syntax for Newbies” thread (started on forum, replies from
mailing list not showing up)
“YAML in limbo?” thread (same as above)
“So I got a binary file…” thread (same)

“[ANN] MinDI 0.3” thread (started on mailing list, isn’t on forum)
“Generate unique filenames” thread (same as above)

However, messages posted on the forum are getting sent to the mailing
list. Is this a known issue?

This is kind of a problem, because people are getting answers to their
questions from the list, but the answers never reach them if they are
using the forum.

-Justin

justincollins · May 2, 2006, 10:07pm

So, we have three lists?

comp.lang.ruby
ruby-talk
ruby-form.com

Minkoo S.

Justin C. wrote:

I posted this on the mailing list, but obviously that didn’t get
duplicated to the forum Sorry to those on the mailing list who have
to see this twice:

It looks like messages sent to the mailing list are not being propagated
to the ruby-forum.com.

Some examples:
“Mixin Syntax for Newbies” thread (started on forum, replies from
mailing list not showing up)
“YAML in limbo?” thread (same as above)
“So I got a binary file…” thread (same)

“[ANN] MinDI 0.3” thread (started on mailing list, isn’t on forum)
“Generate unique filenames” thread (same as above)

However, messages posted on the forum are getting sent to the mailing
list. Is this a known issue?

This is kind of a problem, because people are getting answers to their
questions from the list, but the answers never reach them if they are
using the forum.

-Justin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 12:30am

Justin C. wrote:

It looks like messages sent to the mailing list are not being propagated
to the ruby-forum.com.
However, messages posted on the forum are getting sent to the mailing
list. Is this a known issue?

This is kind of a problem, because people are getting answers to their
questions from the list, but the answers never reach them if they are
using the forum.

Gee, that sucks.

/me mumbles.

I was wondering why the traffic seemed to have died down the last few
days…

I’ve felt for a while now that ruby-forum.com has been neglected
(abandoned?).

If the RForum software works as-is, I am willing to host a mailing list
↔ forum bridge, whether temporarily or permanently.

Pistos

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 1:06am

Justin C. wrote:
It looks like messages sent to the mailing list are not being propagated
to the ruby-forum.com.
However, messages posted on the forum are getting sent to the mailing
list. Is this a known issue?

Does anyone know if ruby-forum.com is missing any posts that have
appeared elsewhere? I’m waiting to see if anyone replies to a couple of
posts I’ve made and I don’t want to double post, but at the same time I
don’t want to miss out on answers to my questions.

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 1:52am

Does anyone know if ruby-forum.com is missing any posts that have
appeared elsewhere? I’m waiting to see if anyone replies to a couple of
posts I’ve made and I don’t want to double post, but at the same time I
don’t want to miss out on answers to my questions.

search ruby-talk… there are replys there that do not appear in the
forum

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 2:04am

brad wrote:

search ruby-talk… there are replys there that do not appear in the
forum

I’m searching here:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/ruby/ruby-talk/threads.html

and can’t seem to find anything. Is there another interface to
ruby-talk?

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 2:20pm

Nathan O. wrote:

brad wrote:

search ruby-talk… there are replys there that do not appear in the
forum

I’m searching here:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/ruby/ruby-talk/threads.html

and can’t seem to find anything. Is there another interface to
ruby-talk?

I’m posting from the ruby-forum so I’m not sure if this will reach
anyone, but if you look at this thread:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/vframe.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/191006?190922-191129
You can see that only some of those replies are also visible on the
forum. The posting behaviour of the thread started indicates that he is
also a forum user and because of that he missed some excellent replies.

(This must be extremely irritating for the ruby-talk subscribers)

Edwin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 5:19pm

Pistos C. wrote:

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 didn’t even know this forum had a mailing list attached to it! I was
suspicious because of the e-mail style quoting which people seem to
enforce as if this were a mailing list, but I didn’t really know. I
googled for “ruby forum” one day and here I am.

How do I subscribe to the mailing list?

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 4:14pm

Edwin van Leeuwen wrote:

I’m posting from the ruby-forum so I’m not sure if this will reach
anyone, but if you look at this thread:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/vframe.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/191006?190922-191129
You can see that only some of those replies are also visible on the
forum. The posting behaviour of the thread started indicates that he is
also a forum user and because of that he missed some excellent replies.

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.

Pistos

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:01pm

On 5/2/06, Justin C. [email protected] wrote:

I posted this on the mailing list, but obviously that didn’t get
duplicated to the forum Sorry to those on the mailing list who have
to see this twice:

Hm. As far as I’m concerned, it’s broken the wrong way.

-austin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:01pm

“Austin Z.” [email protected] writes:

On 5/2/06, Justin C. [email protected] wrote:

I posted this on the mailing list, but obviously that didn’t get
duplicated to the forum Sorry to those on the mailing list who have
to see this twice:

Hm. As far as I’m concerned, it’s broken the wrong way.

Exactly my thoughts.

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 6:23pm

Nathan O. wrote:

How do I subscribe to the mailing list?

Go to ruby-lang.org and look for the Mailing L. link:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020104.html

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:01pm

And I was worried my job was beginning to block my @ruby-lang emails!

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:03pm

I have fixed the problem, no mails were lost.

Pistos C. wrote:

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.

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:05pm

On 5/2/06, Pistos C. [email protected] wrote:

↔ forum bridge, whether temporarily or permanently.
Please don’t. I’m not against ruby-forum in general, but the quality
of posts is generally much lower with minimal information from
ruby-forum than from the mailing list or the newsgroup.

-austin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:02pm

On 5/2/06, Minkoo S. [email protected] wrote:

So, we have three lists?

comp.lang.ruby

ruby-talk

ruby-form.com

We have ruby-talk. This has been mirrored for a long time with
comp.lang.ruby. I haven’t heard anything reliable from the original
mirror person, but it would be nice if someone picked that up again.
In the last year, ruby-forum.com went live and shortly thereafter, a
mirror with ruby-talk was created (also one with the Rails list).

My problem is that for every good posting and question we get from
ruby-forum.com, we get ten nonsensical ones that could have been
solved with a three-second Google search. The problem isn’t the
gateway as such, it’s that forums are the bottom of the barrel when it
comes to what people actually do, and there’s not enough indication to
the users of ruby-forum.com that this is going to both a mailing list
and a newsgroup as well as the forum, so they ask their questions in
forum-style. Which is to say, badly spelled and poorly considered.

I would much rather see ruby-forum.com act differently with respect to
the ruby-talk mailing list. First, the current “Ruby” forum should
probably be renamed and be a read-only view of ruby-talk and
comp.lang.ruby. Second, a new forum should be posted for discussion
purposes. Third, code could be added for moderated questions to be
migrated from the forum discussions to be posted to ruby-talk for
discussion there.

The forum currently makes it too easy to forget that you’re dealing
with people who do not have the full thread in front of them because
they’re not using the forum. It just looks like it.

-austin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 9:23pm

Andreas S. 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.

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.

-Justin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 7:05pm

On May 2, 2006, at 5:35 PM, Austin Z. wrote:

their

questions from the list, but the answers never reach them if
they are
using the forum.
If the RForum software works as-is, I am willing to host a mailing
list
↔ forum bridge, whether temporarily or permanently.

Please don’t. I’m not against ruby-forum in general, but the quality
of posts is generally much lower with minimal information from
ruby-forum than from the mailing list or the newsgroup.

And I’ve seen forum replies come without context, or under a
different name, or in a new thread. This makes answering them very
difficult.

Please, let ruby-form go its own way.

–
Eric H. - [email protected] - http://blog.segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant

http://trackmap.robotcoop.com

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 9:39pm

On 5/3/06, Justin C. [email protected] wrote:

And I’ve seen emails on the mailing list with the same problems. […]

I have seen a dramatic increase in endless September questions since
the establishment of the ruby-forum bidi link.

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.

The web interface is reducing the quality of discussion dramatically,
and merely increasing the warning level is not going to help that. 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.

-austin

justincollins · May 3, 2006, 10:02pm

Austin Z. wrote:

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 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.

I’m not sure it’d be a good idea, but to keep n00bz like me from
drowning the pro discussions, maybe we should have a “basic Ruby
concepts that even experienced developers from other languages might
snag on” forum. 90% of my questions are in regards to Ruby’s
implementation of common features. I see a lot of people with similar
questions.

In any event, it’s dangerous to have a web site with a forum labeled
simply “Ruby.” Everyone will flock to this