On the other hand, while there isn’t a complete Rails social CMS, Rails does have the majority of plugins needed to quickly deploy a social application.  In this repository alone, there is a ton of great plugins, many like make ratable, commentable, google Maps are perfect for a community site.  While I’ve yet to see an all-in-one Rails social platform, there are enough plugins and successful rails social sites (YFly, Curbly, Twittr) to use as inspiration.  There’s also good advice out there (in this case by the makers of Curbly and YFly) To see more, visit “plugins” on the blogroll.

“First, let’s get the basics out of the way. Rails is fundamentally a LAMP architecture, We deploy our site on Sun hardware, behind BigIP load balancers. Like many newer Rails sites, we chose Mongrel as our application server, a lighttpd derivative for static content, and MySQL. Our database is deployed in a master/master/slave configuration for fail over, performance, and scalability.”

Read the case study here.

“focuses on using Rails to build a large database-backed Web application–precisely the kind of application for which Rails is perfectly suited. The application built in this book is a social-networking site like Facebook or MySpace. This represents four principal advantages. First, social networking is a hot topic and is currently generating a high degree of excitement. Second, a social networking application is a big undertaking, giving the authors a chance to show off the many features Rails has to handle large, complex projects, including the Model-Controller-View (MVC) architecture, automated testing, and code refactoring. Third, the authors have extensive experience with this type of application: Michael Hartl cofounded a company to develop sports applications with a strong social component, and Aurelius Prochazka was a founder of ArsDigita, a pioneer in the development of social networking sites. Finally, the step-by-step tutorial approach allows users to see Rails as it is actually used, resulting in learning by example.”

Finally, a complete roadmap for those hoping to build the next mySpace or Youtube. I’ve ordered a rough copy from Safari and will give you some impressions after reading it.

Hybrid Approach # 1: The Benevolent Dictator

Benevolent dictators don’t exactly let the community decide (what self respecting dictator lets the community decide?), but like Google and Mayor Bloomberg and other powerful community leaders in a dominant position, they have the community’s interest at heart and generally heed the advice (or rage) of an advisory board made of community representatives, but they really don’t have to, and often depart from the script at will whenever they please. I used to think Craig Newmark was a Benevolent Dictator, but his flagging system has become so automated that its much more of a collective intelligence approach to cleaning up spam.

Approach #2: The Moderated Community.
This is alot like a community run by a benevolent dictator, but in this case, its more like a country run by Congress, instead of the President, or a city run by the Assembly instead of the Mayor. Many smart forum communities have established “wranglers” that steer the conversation, kick out users, and generally run the community under a mostly silent leader/publisher. This is a great approach, its only downfall is it takes resources to have alot of wranglers and moderators around, and for a bootstrap start up, I had to come up with something else.

Approach #3: collective intelligence meets historical standards.

This is our approach, which utilizes collective intelligence and community empowerment but also sets pre-determined thresholds based on a community’s historical leanings on the issue. For example, while community intelligence determines that a ‘sex service’ ad on craigslist is deemed Offensive, who determines the number (or threshold) at which point these ads should be purged? My research on craigslist suggests that its somewhat artibrarily determined by Craig & Co. and is often randomized in a bid to foil spammers. On hykoo, we will take a city’s historical tolerance when setting these thresholds, and therefore each community will have its own threshold standards for exactly when ads are purged after being flagged. It may take 50 flags to be removed from the New York market, but the same salacious ad may only be flagged 20 times in Minneapolis before disappearing. While we’re still working on a way to quantify historical decency and other standards for every community, lets not get too crazy, we all know Vegas is not Omaha and vice versa.

Hybrid Approach # 1: The Benevolent Dictator

Benevolent dictators don’t exactly let the community decide (what self respecting dictator lets the community decide?), but like Google and Mayor Bloomberg and other powerful community leaders in a dominant position, they have the community’s interest at heart and generally heed the advice (or rage) of an advisory board made of community representatives, but they really don’t have to, and often depart from the script at will whenever they please. I used to think Craig Newmark was a Benevolent Dictator, but his flagging system has become so automated that its much more of a collective intelligence approach to cleaning up spam.

This is alot like a community run by a benevolent dictator, but in this case, its more like a country run by Congress, instead of the President, or a city run by the Assembly instead of the Mayor. Many smart forum communities have established “wranglers” that steer the conversation, kick out users, and generally run the community under a mostly silent leader/publisher. This is a great approach, its only downfall is it takes resources to have alot of wranglers and moderators around, and for a bootstrap start up, I had to come up with something else.

Approach #3: collective intelligence meets historical standards.

This is our approach, which utilizes collective intelligence and community empowerment but also sets pre-determined thresholds based on a community’s historical leanings on the issue. For example, while community intelligence determines that a ‘sex service’ ad on craigslist is deemed Offensive, who determines the number (or threshold) at which point these ads should be purged? My research on craigslist suggests that its somewhat artibrarily determined by Craig & Co. and is often randomized in a bid to foil spammers. On hykoo, we will take a city’s historical tolerance when setting these thresholds, and therefore each community will have its own threshold standards for exactly when ads are purged after being flagged. It may take 50 flags to be removed from the New York market, but the same salacious ad may only be flagged 20 times in Minneapolis before disappearing. While we’re still working on a way to quantify historical decency and other standards for every community, lets not get too crazy, we all know Vegas is not Omaha and vice versa.