About half of the geeks of the world prefer newsgroups for communication and the other half swears by mailing lists. (A tiny percentage prefer web forum or pigeon, but clearly these people suffer from insanity.) The Ruby community has long had both: the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and the Ruby-Talk mailing list.

In 2001, a band of clever adventurers and Rubyists united the two communities with heroic feats of hacking. A “gateway” script was installed that dutifully ferried all messages from one group to the other and visa versa. This was a blessing, because both sides now shared the collective Ruby knowledge. A golden age began.

Unfortunately, a few months back, the evil server hosting monster struck and slew the gateway with a single stoke! (In all fairness, the hosting provided to the gateway over the last five years was more than generous, but that just doesn’t make for as good a story and I’m telling this one!) The golden age ended, the community shattered into two halves…

At HighGroove, we couldn’t stand for that.

Knowing the peril involved, I enlisted the help of the brave HighGroove SysWizard Charles and we went in search of a gateway in need of rescue. It was a long journey and we suffered a minor defeat along the way, but good always triumphs over evil and we cannot be stopped easily!

I’m happy to bring the good news to all the peoples of the Ruby kingdom: the gateway has been resurrected. The golden age has come again.

Please join me thanking all those patrons who sponsored our quest:

• Dave Thomas, First Knight of Ruby, penned the original gateway code and it only needed minor updates even a squire like me could figure out to restore it to its former glory.

• Dennis Oelkers, former Guardian of the Gateway, helped us locate the script-in-distress and taught us much about the care and feeding of such a creature.

• Fred Senault, James’s new best friend by sworn oath, generously gave the gateway the life giving kiss: a newsgroup account.

• The afore mentioned SysWizard Charles, who can quite literally conjure servers to host gateways with the snap of his fingers. His powers are beyond compare.

Thanks to these brave men, the knowledge is again shared by all! Use it wisely my fellow adventurers…