On Nov 15, 2005, at 6:03 PM, Kero wrote:
a webbased forum is a public proxy for an already complicated
newsgroup-mailinglist combo. The fact that it is possible to make
this does
not make it a good idea by itself.
For all practical purposes, what has been created here is just
another MUA and the author has decided to share it.
I’m very surprised at the negative response on this. I think it’s
great.
James Edward G. II
Andrew T. wrote:
How is it easier to read 500 emails in forum form?
Well, I can easily see what threads have had updates since I’ve read
them, and I can easily ignore entire threads. Also, I spend a lot more
time in a browser then a mail client
Likewise. Thank you mutt(1).
Or better yet, reply to the pertinent message and remove any text
that isn’t relevant to your reply, instead of replying to some
random message in the thread.
And when you don’t have a particular reply to reply to? (I usually do
the above when I’m replying to something specific, like right now).
And why was my message the one you replied to? (I’m not looking for an
argument, honest.)
In a perfect world, all MUAs would produce In-Reply-To and References
headers.
Yeah, but we self evidently do not, which is why I proposed something to
augment those.
Both you and I have MUAs that add those headers (well ruby-forum does
it, even though it’s strictly not an MUA).
The line-length is probably set at 72 or some such, as most people
send emails with 72-characters-per-line-long lines
I’m in a browser, I don’t need my lines wrapped at 72 characters, I’d
prefer to have them wrapped depending on the size of my browser window.
Yes, but how would you determine what lines to join?
Furthermore, the human brain, together with the human eye, prefers to
process lines that contain about 72 (note the about) characters.
nikolaiOn 11/15/05, James Edward G. II [email protected] wrote:
For all practical purposes, what has been created here is just
another MUA and the author has decided to share it.
Exactly. Google G. already does what this does, but it’s in their
hands and not the hands of a hopefully suggestion friendly maintainer.
I don’t see what’s wrong with having the same mechanism as google
groups but with more openness to community input.
I’m very surprised at the negative response on this. I think it’s
great.
So do I. I love vim and the GPL, but I try really hard not to say no
one should ever use Emacs or the MIT license. (I like one more than
the other of the two mentioned)
People should not personal choices get in the way of others personal
choices. To me, the more the merrier, and the ghost of Tim Toady
would be proud of our community with it’s many diverse ways of getting
involved 
Andrew T. wrote:
Likewise. Thank you mutt(1).
Yeah, I saw this one coming
I’m just stating my personal
preference, I prefer a forum to a mailinglist any day.
And why was my message the one you replied to? (I’m not looking for
an argument, honest.)
Last one in the thread at the time, what else should I have done?
This is precisely why a list-view of a thread is such a bad paradigm.
You “should have” responded to the initial message, as your response was
directed at that message (or the thread as a whole as it were), not my
response to it in particular.
Furthermore, the human brain, together with the human eye, prefers
to process lines that contain about 72 (note the about) characters.
If you say so, I find the wrapping on most emails kind of annoying, it
also makes things a lot longer vertically then they would be if they
wrapped in a more efficent fashion.
Give me verticality over horizontality any day! 
nikolaiThe reason behind all this is that I fear needless
fragmentation. The Ruby community grows, it will have to
fragment to some extent, we can’t populate a mailing list
with ten times more people. Rails split off the main lists,
main IRC, even gets its own conference. Fine, it seems a
clear cut distinction (but given all other useful web
frameworks in Ruby, I doubt it deserves to be this clear cut).
I organize Vancouver Ruby Association (vanruby.com), and found that
during
our meetings 70% of the attendance interest was on Rails. We recently
did a
presentation on SOAP4R, a great technology, but what everyone was
interested
in was how it applied to Rails. As the talk went on, we discussed Rails
ActionWebService and such.
When interest is this high, and people are focused on the
implementation,
rather than the foundation, it would seem natural to encourage
conferences
such as Canada on Rails, which are specifically geared for such
interest.
Once you have gone to an event such a CoR, and have a superficial
understanding of the implementation, then you dive deeper into the
language,
and go for RubyConf, and more core technologies.
I have been learning Rails for several months now, and at first I was
simply
learning the MVC principles and architecture, but once I want to dive
deeper
into the functionality and build a serious application, I found I needed
very drastically to get familiar with the language it was built on,
Ruby. If
I didn’t have the entrance point of Rails, I likely would not be
organizing
the Rails conference, which will in turn promote Ruby by default
Warmest regards,
Nathaniel
James Edward G. II wrote:
I’m very surprised at the negative response on this. I think it’s
great.
My responses haven’t been negative, I hope. I’ve tried to keep a level
head here and simply ask why (on Earth) anyone would want a forum view.
To me, forums are about the worst way to present information. But all I
wanted to know was the reasons for people liking it. I don’t care if
people use it or not, as long as it doesn’t have an adverse effect on
this list as a whole.
nikolaiNot sure if this is related to the Rails mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails?lnk=li
blargity wrote (in part):
I love Ruby, and even more, love getting paid to write in it.
Can I work there?
andreas wrote:
I have set up a forum that mirrors the ruby-talk and rails mailing lists:
If you notice problems or have any suggestions, please send me a mail.
I very much like the “if you log in, threads with messages you haven’t
read are in bold” feature. And the “sort threads by most recent
activity feature”.
But it would be much more useful if it used the info more, so that
when I go into a thread where I’ve not read (say) the last 3 out of 40
messages, instead of having to jump to the bottom and move up to see the
newest stuff, the page produced had
Display already-read messages
----------------------------- (that’s supposed to be a URL)
followed by the messages I haven’t yet read. That would mean that I’d
be fine if I had only read 23 of the 40 messages as well…
(Can we get to threads older than the ones shown? Activity seems to be
falling off the bottom quickly, unless I read from the bottom up…)
The option for a hierarchical display of sender / time / header, with
bold marking unread posts, showing only text for unread posts, and an
AJAX mechanism to get the text of any/all desired already-read posts –
that would be truly excellent.
There were some discussions about people having a way to vote for
threads. That, and a way to nominate answers for some kind of FAQ,
would be other great additions. Are you planning either of those?
Thanks for the effort.
On Tuesday 15 November 2005 20:46, Nathaniel S. H. Brown wrote:
I have been learning Rails for several months now, and at first I was
simply learning the MVC principles and architecture, but once I want to
dive deeper into the functionality and build a serious application, I found
I needed very drastically to get familiar with the language it was built
on, Ruby. If I didn’t have the entrance point of Rails, I likely would not
be organizing the Rails conference, which will in turn promote Ruby by
default
This is great. Some of us come from the other side, as I had no idea
what
Ruby was or why I should care. The project I’m writing will have a web
piece, so my boss (who is very smart) was looking at RoR. We decided on
Ruby
for the application, regardless of web framework, as it’s not simply a
web
app, and here I am. So it was rails that got me into Ruby, but I still
haven’t used it. Ever.
I love Ruby, and even more, love getting paid to write in it.
(thanks matz, you already have a spot in the glory box.)
j-merrill wrote:
I very much like the “if you log in, threads with messages you haven’t
read are in bold” feature. And the “sort threads by most recent
activity feature”.But it would be much more useful if it used the info more, so that
when I go into a thread where I’ve not read (say) the last 3 out of 40
messages, instead of having to jump to the bottom and move up to see the
newest stuff
The forum creates an anchor called “new” on the first new post, so if
you open the topic your browser should jump to the first post you
haven’t read yet. Doesn’t this work for you?
The option for a hierarchical display of sender / time / header, with
bold marking unread posts, showing only text for unread posts, and an
AJAX mechanism to get the text of any/all desired already-read posts –
that would be truly excellent.
That should not be too hard to implement. Though other things are more
important first.
There were some discussions about people having a way to vote for
threads. That, and a way to nominate answers for some kind of FAQ,
would be other great additions. Are you planning either of those?
Voting is planned (actually it’s already implemented in the model, only
the view/controller stuff is missing).
andreas wrote:
j-merrill wrote:
I very much like the “if you log in, threads with messages you haven’t
read are in bold” feature. And the “sort threads by most recent
activity feature”.But it would be much more useful if it used the info more, so that
when I go into a thread where I’ve not read (say) the last 3 out of 40
messages, instead of having to jump to the bottom and move up to see the
newest stuffThe forum creates an anchor called “new” on the first new post, so if
you open the topic your browser should jump to the first post you
haven’t read yet. Doesn’t this work for you?
Hmmm, it might well – this is the only thread that’s had new posts (by
someone other than me) since I read it, and it seems I got directly to
the message I’m replying to when it (again) was shown as bold.
We’ll see when you answer this.
What’s the story about getting to older threads?
j-merrill wrote:
What’s the story about getting to older threads?
andreas wrote:
j-merrill wrote:
What’s the story about getting to older threads?
Thanks. Why not have a link to that (and the prev and next) and the
bottom and/or top of each page?
BTW, the anchor is working fine. Thanks for this effort.
Note that I am still getting the mails, because I can use “X1 Desktop
Search” on them. Have you considered using David B.'s “Ferret” to
provide a search mechanism for the forum?
j-merrill wrote:
andreas wrote:
j-merrill wrote:
What’s the story about getting to older threads?
Thanks. Why not have a link to that (and the prev and next) and the
bottom and/or top of each page?
There is a link.
BTW, the anchor is working fine. Thanks for this effort.
Note that I am still getting the mails, because I can use “X1 Desktop
Search” on them. Have you considered using David B.'s “Ferret” to
provide a search mechanism for the forum?
There already is a search mechanism, currently using simple SQL LIKE
matching. Other available search backends are MySql boolean search and
Odeum.
andreas wrote:
Hi,
I have set up a forum that mirrors the ruby-talk and rails mailing
lists:If you notice problems or have any suggestions, please send me a mail.
Andreas
This is JUST FANTASTIC !
Apart from some small suggestions (concerning email/spam)
Please KISS and don’t touch it !
Congrats,
Andre
On 11/16/05, J. Merrill [email protected] wrote:
andreas wrote:
j-merrill wrote:
What’s the story about getting to older threads?
Thanks. Why not have a link to that (and the prev and next) and the
bottom and/or top of each page?
There is: at the top-right of the list there is a “<< Page X >>” where
the << and >> are links to the previous and next pages (absent when
not applicable). Adding a similar construct to the bottom of the list
may be worth looking in to.
Jacob F.
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