Group Website Purgatory

The Hong Kong Ruby on Rails user group website has disappeared. Searching on the unhelpful Google Groups help forum shows this is not an isolated experience. Perhaps someday, maybe today, Google will magically restore our mailing list. But until then, the user group has just lost is voice and I’m beginning to think about alternatives.

At first I thought about just creating a new Google Group, but why should I go back to a service that’s already proven to be flakey? So this had me doing a quick search for alternatives.

The two heavy weights in the online group space are Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups. The other mainstay is simply setting up your own mailing list or forum and/or website +/- a wiki. I’d rather not host my own, but it might come to that. If I want to find some other hosted group website service to trust until they delete me, I’ve plenty of choices:

• Ning
• Tangler
• Grou.ps
• Collective X

And I’m sure there’s a dozen I haven’t heard of. Care you share one or two with me?

When we figure out what’s going on with the Ruby user group, I’ll have an update for you.

PS- If anyone recommends Facebook for groups, I’ll… :-)