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.
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.
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.
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.
I have updated the post to reflect that my criticisms were aimed at the main, English language version of the site, and have apologized to those running well maintained localized, foreign language sub-sites who may have felt they were included in my analysis.
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).
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.
I wouldn't put too much effort in judging a language or a community based on the free, unpaid-for, unmaintained website. If you look at the Ruby community, and I include Rails, Sinatra and Padrino folks as well, you'll see that the majority of the activity takes places in more of a social setting, examples being http://rubygems.org/gems/gemcutter and http://github.com and the great podcasts from folks like Peter Cooper, et al.
The time for engaging through a one-way webpage has long passed.
I actually agree with this, and feel that any sort of official site should link out to others as quickly as possible (rather than be a monolithic resource). Having some sort of official site is useful, however, since there are lot of people who aren't familiar with the modern ways and who will be looking at the official site for guidance. Currently those people are getting told RubyForge is the greatest thing since sliced bread..
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.
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.