Elieen was kind enough to point out rails uses this forum here for feature requests. It is outlined in this rails guide and in my excitement I didn’t read it (shameful I know ).
Unpacking this a little further, I realized the reason I posted it on github issues were that all other communities I engage with use github issues for feature requests. Those would be the javascript communities like: VueJS, Cypress, VSCode, React, etc all use github issues.
Looking a little further, expo has a public roadmap based on upvoted feature requests. This is extremely useful to help you know current limitation and where you as a contributor can help. For example, if you wanted in-app purchases, which is planned, you can ask if you can try to take it on if you need that for a project.
This brings me to two problems with using this forum:
Low visibility compared to github issues - I’ve been doing rails 7+ years and never knew about this. Looking at this issue it is clear that others are struggling to find it too. Thus, we get lower community engagement.
Lack of transparency - this has been brought up a few times that a lot of planned work for rails is not transparent enough. In my experience it is easier to merge a PR if the reviewer and author both have prior agreement on scope/overall approach. It is easier to discuss these things closer to the code on a github issue.
I understand this will mean a change to how the PM process of rails and I do not have full-context to whether or not it makes sense. However it is worth while considering.
Ultimate goal: increase community engagement and collaboration.
Hey @yagudaev I came across this post, as well as your ActiveSearch proposal in my email digest for this forum. I recently had to implement search for two Rails projects, so your proposal caught my eye. I don’t know enough about adding features to rails to offer any useful suggestions on your other post I’m also interested in communities, so I figured I’d chime in on this post
If I’ve read your previous post correctly, you’re concerned with promoting engagement and collaboration in the rails community, and you think that having a forum for feature requests that is separate from GitHub issues reduces engagement. You also think that the lack of a public roadmap is a problem. Is that an accurate summary?
That is an accurate summary indeed. Sounds like the digest are useful way to find out about new topics.
I was thinking about how to run an open-source project successfully and in a sustainable way. This lead me to dig into how the rails project runs as opposed to other projects. I’d like the see the talk about “is rails dead” stop. The only way to do that is to grow the number of people contributing to rails.
A roadmap and having all the feature and bugs on github and Q&A on stackoverflow will make it easier to contribute. For example, what is a good issue to give back and start contributing to rails? Many projects have a label for issues like that. There are no open issues with this label for rails: Issues · rails/rails · GitHub.
It would be nice to have that and tackle them as a community.
Now imagine for a moment, someone in the rails core team was already working on a search feature. How will I know about it? I have a lot of interest in it and I would like to give back to this wonderful project I’ve been using for 8+ years now.
Hello Michael.
In regards to adding a native search option to Rails, I think that would be beneficial. I have implemented search via pg_search for as long as I can remember, but have always felt I cobbled this together with bits and pieces scrounged from the repo and other apps. An omakase offering from the house would be welcome.
For your second point about community engagement, I would also just like to add one enthusiastic yes to your comments. I’d love to be able to contribute something to Rails to help it thrive and move forward, but this seems like a real pain point from my observations looking in.
Your suggestions in both of these areas are spot on.
Thanks :). I read a few interesting posts on the forum, one was this, it filled me with new hope. It was great to see a productive discussion even on a subjective topic.
I’m trying out Github Projects for PM on the search project. I’ll see how it works, ZenHub is another great alternative. I’m hoping having github issues will let people comment on things openly.
Some of the projects I mentioned above are run by companies who have dedicated PM and community engagement roles assigned. AFAIK, rails is run by volunteers and we don’t have such person.
Looking at it from the point of view of the core team, maybe features do make sense as gems to start with. If so, we can say so in the contribution guide. If we look at the active storage PR, there are over 7K lines and 250 commits. That is a lot of code to review. Reviewing a 1K code PR is hard, let alone 7K one. It is also clear from the PR that a few people from core were paring on it, which made it far easier to review. This is really the path I was interested in discovering. In other words, what can be done day 1 to make it easier and faster to merge new code into rails.
Stimulus Reflex Discord - always lots of smart people willing to help with issues around the library, but also around Rails, Ruby and even Python
I’ve tried to find the IRC channels and use them, but frankly couldn’t figure out which client to use. It felt a little clunky, like a Fax machine. Then again, maybe I just don’t know how to use it. If someone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome too.
It will be nice to update the community pages on Ruby and Rails with some of those communities.
).
I’m also interested in communities, so I figured I’d chime in on this post 
