Ok, I signed up to the Ruby on Rails mailing list some weeks ago thinking that this was a really great place to learn a lot about using Ruby and Rails together.
Shortly after that things were migrated to this google groups and I found several things happened all at once -- I don't know if this is all by design or by mistake but this is what I observed....
My mailing list is dead. No more mail. The website implies that this is still a mailing list. It isn't. Now in order to do anything I have to send an email into some group and then.... troll through hundreds of web pages trying to find my post and any relevant responses. I don't know what possessed the community that this was a good thing, but my experience is that retrieving information now takes 10 - 100 times longer because I can't just scan my mailbox.
So, few posts, fewer replies, no sense of connection to this bustling community.
One of the key factors in the attractiveness of open source software and many of the projects that I have been involved in is the accessibility of the supporting community. Hard to access support counts strongly against the attractiveness of the overall product.
In this case, the ease of use countered by the difficulty to access the community support doesn't do much to raise Ruby above any of the other web framework communities out there.
Why?
Is there anything that can be done to reverse this decision?
I like this Ruby/Rails stuff, but the difficulty in using the current interface is so great that it is now more difficult to work in Rails than it is in other systems that are notably more difficult to work in -- eg: HTML::Mason in Perl isn't as easy, but the support is there.
I'm not going to make any attempt to "fix" anything. But I would like to know if there is anything that people know of as an alternative to this mailing list?
PS: If I were to offer any fixes then I would put up my own mail server as a host for the mailing list, but I'll assume that's already been discussed.
I'm not going to make any attempt to "fix" anything. But I would like to know
if there is anything that people know of as an alternative to this mailing list?
surely its your settings on the google thing … as i have 3000 odd messages in (a folder in) my inbox from this mailing list …
i dont know anything more than that, as I havent even been active in this thing for ages, I think i was even on digest for the last year … however since migration im on the full bodied beast.
it definitely is ‘alive’ - but i would have a mess with your settings on the list … but considering you have to trawl through the website to see this … my post might be in vein.
just my ‘observation’…
however i do agree with some of your points … this list blows my head off when i try and read it … so i just let it fill up my hard drive instead.
Yes I do. as it turns out, google groups is tagged by sorbs as a
spammer.
even better. This is the first mailing list I've ever had out of some
20 that has this problem.
Was this a consideration when the decision was made?
Well… The fact that sorbs marks the biggest mailing list system as a spam tells us a hell of a lot more about the quality and professional level of sorbs than anything else.
I must say that I also prefer the old system, with the web based bridge
(without it it's anoying). From my point of view it worked very well,
and the search option available never let me down.
On the other hand, yesterday I posted a message through the GMail
groups form and it was never published. Today I posted a new one and
this time I had success.
I do believe that this new option is much more easier to mantain and as
a lower TOC, but a project with the dimension of Rails diserves its own
forum system.
Well... The fact that sorbs marks the biggest mailing list system as a spam tells us a hell of a lot more about the quality and professional level of sorbs than anything else.
Don't be too judgmental.
it's much kinder on Debian, postfix, Suse, Ruby, (old) rails, Apache and a dozen others out there.
sorbs is one of the better RBL systems.
What would you recommend in it's place?
I'm not going to make any attempt to "fix" anything. But I would like to
know if there is anything that people know of as an alternative to this
mailing list?
FWIW, my email was hosted at TextDrive (same place as the original
list) and I had nothing but problems. My posts sometimes took hours to
appear, and the messages I was getting as opposed to messages on the
ruby talk forum as opposed to the mailman archive were all different.
I signed up for digest, but I still had 3-4 day old messages trickling
in for some time.
I don't think the old list was up to snuff, and it was also sucking
processing time from other central resources. Google Groups is fast,
very searchable and usable. I don't want to diminish others' problems,
but for me it's been a big step forward.
The migration didn't go as smoothly as the list managers might have
hoped, but I think the Google Groups interface is pretty slick. YES,
you can get emails (or a digest or, my fav, an Abridged digest) but you
need to choose those options in your settings. You do have to learn
the tool, but it's not THAT complicated.
Think of it as an evolutionary step. I'm sure there were a lot of
people who were 'put off' by the invention of a hammer (why do I need a
hammer, my rock works just fine?) but in the end they figured it out.
Another alternative web interface for this list (and many others
including several more Ruby/Rails lists) is available here:
http://www.nabble.com/Ruby-Lang-f13925.html (Go up a level to see the
other Ruby lists)