Ummm.... Blogs / forums are one of the most key selling points for Rails. You'll notice the first thing they teach in you in all the guides is how to make a blog - in under 5 minutes. Login and RBAC is a breeze too. I realize this post was created, eh, 4 years ago, so maybe things were different with Rails then. But rest assured, Rails 3 will be a breeze to recreate this.

But just the fact that a site devoted to Rails was made in PHP is just sickening... makes you question the creditability, you know?

Sickening? I don't love PHP, but that could be one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. I guess we will be seeing your forum written in Rails and a bullet proof data migration tool for PHP forums ....

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But just the fact that a site devoted to Rails was made in PHP is just sickening... makes you question the creditability, you know?

http://code.google.com/p/eldorado/source

http://newathens.org/forum

@jbartels: Bingo.  For years 37Signals even used MoveableType for their blog (they only switched to their in-house RoR-powered system earlier this year, I believe).  PunBB suits us well right now, and there's no need to change to an inferior system (like Beast -- very nice, but let's face it, not quite up to PunBB) just because it's made in Ruby on Rails. 

We are slowly working on our own in house system though, via a project under the direction of some of our members (namely RyanB, danger, and thabenksta).

This is funny.  Seems even more silly to have advertising for Rails books and not be a Rails site though.  Initially I hesitated to join this forum seeing as it was not written in RoR.  But realized that yes there are far more prebuilt systems from others.

Subtantially, its better to have this forum than not.  It is good it exists and continues to grow.

Of course, this could be built on RoR

I think that this is a good example of "If it ain't broke don't fix it". There is a metric wad (~1.268 standard bunches) of good forum software and very few reasons for a complete recreation of that in a new language.

linoj: One of my main concerns is strong moderation controls.  More or less we want something that will at least match what we have already with PunBB.  We're working on something, as I've said, but it can be slow going at time as everyone who is working on it has full time jobs doing other stuff.