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?
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.
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?
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 G. is fast,
very searchable and usable. I don’t want to diminish others’ problems,
but for me it’s been a big step forward.
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?
The migration didn’t go as smoothly as the list managers might have
hoped, but I think the Google G. 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)
This forum is not affiliated to the Ruby language, Ruby on Rails framework, nor any Ruby applications discussed here.