That's a good point, really. There is no magic involved, even though
it usually seems a lot like it is, at least when you just got the
idea.

However, I do think there's some pretty good arguments for making a
new site. This question/answer thing might sound a lot like a forum,
only that this particular page won't look like a forum at all. There's
no categories and boards, and no duplicate posts - the mod team tags
stuff (the community might tag stuff as well, but the mod team needs
to be nazis to make sure things are tagged "properly") and deletes
duplicates. And because it's an "official" site - at least that's what
it should be imo - you can't just forward the problem and say "sorry,
cba to answer" - the goal should be to answer all questions (unless
the question is obviously dumb and breaking Rails conventions, like
accessing sessions in models etc).

This should ideally be a collection of pretty much all the questions
people might have. You might argue that we'll get tons of dupe posts,
and half the job will be to delete those. But isn't that OK anyway?
I'm a regular on #rubyonrails (IRC), and we're basically being google
for the people there. They don't know what to search for and stuff, so
we're interpreting their questions and giving them an api link or a
google query in 2/3 of the questions. So the deleting-dupe-and-
pointing-out-the-answer to dupe posters is sort a part of the service.

Repeating myself here, but oh well - forums and mailing lists has no
clean and awesome way of detecting dupes when you get past a certain
amount of posts. Like, if someone posted a question here one year ago,
I doubt anyone is arsed to find that. This is because there's probably
10% unanswered posts, a lot of duplicates going on, and a lot of posts
with 2-3 retarded answers. This is mostly due to not having nazi-
moderation on dupes and such. And it's not because users are too lazy
to search or anything, they simply don't know what (or how) to search
for.

So as far as I can see, this is a new concept. Not just for Rails, but
open source projects in general.

Anyway, new webapp or not, I hope this posting of mine would at least
get a doc team running. Can't see why not =)

On Dec 13, 5:10 pm, "Jack Danger Canty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> >  The API is an API, though, and
> > not a sufficient resource for someone completely new to rails, and
> > even completely new to making webapps in general.
>
> Amen! How soon we forget the difficulty of starting out in a new field :-)
>
> Right now we've got three main resources that help newbs learn Rails for
> free: the rubyonrails mailing list (bulgeoning now, perhaps past it's
> usefulness),http://railsforum.com(where 97% of the good answers are by
> Ryan Bates), and RailsCasts (created by Ryan Bates).
>
> There used to be Rails Weenie, which worked almost exactly in the
> question/answer format you're describing, but it seems to have gone the way
> of the wooly mammoth.
>
> So I think you're on to something but we need to be careful not to just
> create another resource.  We web developers tend to think that any problem
> can be solved with a website :-)
>
> ::Jack Danger
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