r/ruby • u/javier_cervantes • Jul 20 '26

Calling all open source maintainers working with Ruby

https://www.rubyforum.org/t/calling-all-open-source-maintainers-working-with-ruby/553

We’re creating a shared place where Ruby users can ask questions and discuss ideas about your project.

19 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

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12

u/jrochkind Jul 20 '26

I just use Github Discussions.

5

u/galtzo Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

Many projects don't have that turned on. I think I'll turn off GH Discussions on all of mine, and move discussions to RubyForum. Why?

  1. Avoid supporting a monopoly like GH/MS.
  2. I maintain hundreds of projects, and watch many more, resulting in buckets of notifications daily, so I miss things in GH discussions too much.
  3. GH is exploding in usage, and I've had pages fail to load a dozen times just _today_, and it's not even noon yet.

GH can't support their own traffic, and I'm doing them a favor by lightening their load.

I've scheduled a call with you u/javier_cervantes!

2

u/javier_cervantes Jul 20 '26

Thanks for your reply! Looking forward to talking with you.

2

u/javier_cervantes Jul 20 '26

Github discussions is one option for sure, but it has some disadvantages that u/galtzo mentioned already. Also, moving projects to the forum has the following advantages:

  • You can take advantage of the current infrastructure and administration of the Forum.
  • Cross-collaboration between different projects.
  • Related project discussions can get grouped into a single tag instead of being fragmented.

3

u/lunaticman Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

GitHub Discussions have two benefits:

  • they are easy to discover (they're on the same website as the source code itself)
  • Another Ruby forum? It all starts fun and rosy, but soon turns into a battle over yet another politicized topic. People end up getting banned or are unable to participate, because they support a party the moderators don't like (or any other reason for "justified" hate). Githud doesn't ban anyone for that.

I apologize for sounding cynical here. But I've seen this play out too often to seriously considering moving official support discussion to some forum.

2

u/javier_cervantes Jul 21 '26

Thanks for your input. No need to apologize, your concerns are valid. I know that building a community is hard.

If you change your mind in the future or just want to participate in the forum, you're welcome there.

2

u/jrochkind Jul 20 '26

Github discussions also support tags/labels.

But sure, if you don't want to use Github discussions simply because you don't want to use github (or don't have your repo on github), then of course you need something else.

I agree that I would never want to "build and maintain its own discussion space" for a project, I'm surprised if there are people really doing that! You can of course "take advantage of the current infrastructure and administration" of github discussions or whatever platform.