

The Official Ruby Site Is Proudly Maintained by No-One - jordanmessina
http://www.rubyinside.com/official-ruby-site-not-so-good-5248.html

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Argorak
As one of the maintainers of the german version of ruby-lang.org/de, I think
that the article fails to explain the scope of ruby-lang and the pain to
maintain it. Ruby is - much more then other programming languages -
internationally spread (japan/western world being the greatest divide). At the
moment, there are 20 translations (released and unreleased) of the site, which
means that all new content has to be introduced to the site and then
translated and maintained by the corresponding teams. So the scope of the site
has to be small, nothing compared to php.net or the like.

First of all: not all of these problems are present in other versions of the
site. The german page for example is much more up-to-date when it comes to
installation options and explaining them, also when it comes to announcements
about the german ruby community. The german site is also well staffed with 3
maintainers (if I remember correctly).

I would have preferred if ruby-inside would have wrote a mail to the
maintainer list before posting this: usually, problems that we are aware of
get fixed quickly.

ruby-lang certainly has its problems and the post hits some of them, but it is
far from unmaintained.

The positive effect of this post: a bunch of new volunteers applying.

~~~
petercooper
_The positive effect of this post: a bunch of new volunteers applying._

This is exactly it.

I _know_ I'm a loudmouth playing with his megaphone here, but my intentions
are good and I'm pointing to things that, I believe, people would _like to
fix_ , if only they had the spotlight for a bit. If I can help that process
without greatly offending anyone, I'll use my megaphone. I gain nothing from
pissing people off without reason.

I didn't get in touch with anyone because I don't have the diplomatic skills
to negotiate significant changes to the site, and small patches won't fix the
_systemic_ problems with the site (How much negotiation would it take even
just to have the official blog posts written properly by a third party? And I
already do it anyway, on my own site.) I readily admit I'm a unilateralist who
tries to be in charge at most opportunities. This makes me a reasonable
entrepreneur, but definitely not the ideal candidate to work in a team to
update a community site :-)

Thanks for reminding me of the localized versions. I was aware of their
presence but had/have little idea of what they're doing. I can't say I support
the idea of an EU-like 20 way translation for every change but that's just my
opinion, and I have the utmost respect for local teams trying their best to
maintain the site in their own language.

~~~
Argorak
I am not "offended", but I think the effect could be much improved by at least
hearing the guys actually working on the site first - not negotiating, but
collect their problems as well. Yes, there are many problems - but they are
not that there are not enough editors or none of them cares. For example, we
would happily announce every tiny conference on the site and could also do
that, if organizers would just send us a short note. I think most of us would
do with a link and write the article themselves. Instead, there are major
conferences that seem to be announced on twitter only. What I cannot and do
not want to do (I am also tending for a german ruby portal next to this job)
is actively scrape the interwebs for such information.

Also, there is no-one who takes stewardship of the technical part of the site
- the "popular projects" widget that is still backed by an effectively dead
site (rubyforge) is one of them. This is not a unique problem: rubygems.org
has similar problems of finding people to implement/change features. This
would be important.

When it comes to languages: I am not sure whether 20 languages is okay, but I
am quite proud that we do actually have non-english sites and can link to non-
english resources. I reckon that the japanese community likes it as well. As
long as there is someone pouring its time into it, i'm fine with it - and its
actually not working as bad as it seems.

My biggest problem is that the Ruby community is big on decentralization and
no one cares about dragging stuff back together. For example, there are at
least 2 people managing great documentation indices (ruby-doc.org and
rubydoc.info) that wouldn't have evolved if we had integrated the docs into
the main site. What I would really enjoy would be a team that tries to
organize that forest a bit and maybe direct efforts of volunteers.

~~~
petercooper
I can't disagree with you and it sounds like you might have enough background
knowledge to lead such an effort if you had the time and inclination to do so.

I've merely noticed a problem and I'm pointing it out. I readily admit I am
also not the person to fix it, much like Jon Stewart couldn't fix the American
political system, yet still he points out its flaws. Would you expect him to
write letters to Fox News before picking on them? I'm no comedian but I'm
taking a similar approach. If the only option is to write e-mails and have
long winded discussions, I'd choose to do nothing instead.

 _My biggest problem is that the Ruby community is big on decentralization and
no one cares about dragging stuff back together._

Yes. As you note, this is both a problem _and_ a benefit, in some cases.
Perhaps, then, any sort of "official" Ruby site should focus solely on linking
out to up to date third party resources rather than (poorly) maintaining its
own.

And, again, I must stress that it seems the localization teams have been doing
some great work and deserve recognition for this. My points rest entirely with
the "main" English language site.

------
angelortega
The article may be seen as a comprehensive list of what not-TO-DO for a
project's site.

~~~
Jarred
Yeah, Ruby's website is awful. Even Ruby on Rails' website is pretty bad. They
don't make it look nearly as awesome as it actually is.

~~~
bad_user
As an outsider, I think RubyonRails.org is doing a pretty good job.

The install instructions are pretty good, links to documentation and books are
good, the screencasts are kept up to date and are IMHO awesome, the blog is
active.

What else could you want? I mean, yeah, the Rails Guides could use some more
effort as I found them lacking, but it's a lot better than nothing at all (as
it used to be).

~~~
petercooper
I don't think rubyonrails.org is too bad, but it could still do with some
updates. For example, it doesn't recommend railsinstaller.org to the Windows
folks, even though that's the quickest, one-shot way to install the entire
Rails and Ruby stack on Windows.

And I don't think linking to a tarball with the Ruby source should be the
_first_ link to getting Ruby.. there are tutorials they could link to that
would be more useful to newcomers.

Nonetheless, rubyonrails.org is better updated than ruby-lang.org in any case,
and provides a better model to follow IMHO.

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acme
I suspect it's because Ruby hackers like to write modules, not document or
maintain websites.

~~~
draegtun
Also it's hard to write good documentation and lots of hackers probably won't
have the necessary skill set. However documentation is important and the more
you work at it the better and easier it gets.

~~~
chc
The Ruby documentation is at ruby-doc.org rather than ruby-lang.org.

------
julianz
Doesn't seem to be commented on by anyone, either. Oops, damn!

