Just about 2 weeks ago I have been bitching about the #rubyonrails channel (no need to look it up as this article will negate that anyways). Fortunately (for everyone I guess 🙂 some prominent rails guys came after me, gently kicked my ass and challenged me to check out #rubyonrails again (after leaving a bit pissed off about 2 years ago), claiming that the atmosphere has changed drastically.

So, I took their advice, joined the channel, and was indeed pleasantly surprised. During my 2+ weeks of stay, I can’t remember any incident (ok, except the constant trolling on TextMate vs Vim, Mac vs Linunx, Shoulda vs rSpec, jQuery ftw, how RJS sucks, how Java sucks (well, initiated by me ;-)) and found most of the people very friendly and helpful. Also made a few friends and had some great fun.

I also discovered some great #rubyonrails stats by @radarlistener and persuaded him to add a little feature to it: display then number of thanks per all messages. It’s not a huge feature, but we can find out some interesting stuff with it – for example, the signal to noise ratio off different guys: which of them are helping out the most on average (we could probably dig out the reverse info too – a.k.a. help vampires, but that’s outside of the scope of this post).

So, without further ado, here is a top 30 list (the number behind the nick denotes “lines per thanks”, i.e. how much lines the given person had to enter to receive a “thank you”):

1. pet3r: 69
2. stympy: 70
3. octopod: 83
4. mikeg1a: 90
5. mf_irc: 97
6. koppen: 105
7. noodl: 120
8. eljo: 120
9. topfunky: 126
10. leeo: 128
11. fcheung: 129
12. chippy: 137
13. rainmkr: 138
14. gerhardlazu: 139
15. blj: 142
16. madrobby: 142
17. darix: 154
18. toretore: 158
19. minam: 162
20. thread: 162
21. donomo: 166
22. halorgium: 168
23. sonofslim: 169
24. don-o: 170
25. claudio: 176
26. melvinram: 180
27. bitsweat: 180
28. ddfreyne: 181
29. archetypo: 183
30. jacobat: 185

Hey where’s lifo and rsl? Wtf?!!11!1! My script must be buggy… need to spend more time on #rubyonrails to learn this Ruby thingy properly.

Thanks to @radarlistener for his great work on the stats, as well as other great #rubyonrails bots.