So unless these tests could prove that the forum would work (which is highly unlikely) then my vote would be not to do this. It's akin to putting the services issue logging/tracking system under the same service [1]. It's a bad idea IMO.

I was about to say that an outage might risk killing the community, which would be bad, but 1) we still have this forum and GitHub (as krapp points out), and 2) if the community is really so weak that it can't revert a commit in order to get the forum running again, it's probably not worth hosting a separate site anyway.

The idea is growing on me, just because of how audacious it is. (^^)

I do agree with some of your point though; it would be good to have some separate logging and bootstrap systems in place so that we can detect and repair faults more easily, without the intervention of a specific admin. For one thing, the software that pulls the changes will probably not be arc-based, so it should still be running even if the forum goes down. Secondly, we could try to set it up so that it always pulls hotfix patches immediately when the logging / monitor system indicates failure.

The only reasons for thinking about it now are that 1) we want to add some features to the forum, and there's no way to test them here, and 2) it isn't actually a bad idea to have a community site for Anarki. The risk of weakening the community has deterred me from the idea of forking the arc forum, but if we still treat this as the 'official' arc community, and make a separate site more focused around anarki, I don't think that would be too bad.

> It might actually help some, since separating more could allow us to really focus on and develop our unique points of experimental language hacking.

Currently, this is an Arc forum. People are drawn here from pg's posts about Arc, and their attraction to the simplicity and beauty of the language. Also probably dreams of silver bullets... That won't stop just because we make a separate community, and I really don't think there's anything wrong with it.

However, I think we're also torn a bit between maintaining basically a bugfix version of arc, or going on to develop it further.

The question then is what "further" means - which direction would it go? One answer is that it can't really be predicted; creating such a community would be a way to find out.

On the other hand I can speculate, based on what I've seen of this community so far.

People come, entranced by pg's vision of arc, and then find out that the code base itself is really small and approachable. In general, lisp variants are used by people who like to make the language fit their needs, but where most dialects would add to the language via macros, with arc (or anarki) people find it just as easy to hack on the core of the language itself. Eventually this leads them to forking it, or building their own implementation in javascript or something.

I suspect this is partly because arc is so small, and does not have many standard libraries or a package system. You can read it all in a fairly short amount of time. So the fact that most of the code is aimed at developing arc means that the easiest thing to develop with it is... arc.

This trend of exploration and extension will undoubtedly continue, and I think it will be much more free to develop into something significant if we simply look at anarki with the slightly different perspective that having a separate community site we could actually upgrade might offer. Instead of being weighed down by arc as the 'community bugfix edition', it could become a 'language based on arc' with a solid foundation, but room to grow.

The core paradigms and strengths of arc appear to be "exploratory programming", and "language hacking". I think it would be cool if we could develop the former beyond the latter, but who knows how it will turn out?

I've often thought that the structure of the news.arc forum is rather unhelpful for the arc community, especially now that we're so small and lethargic. Conversations can go extended periods of time without comment, so they get locked. Or they fall off the front page, and hard to find again. Neither is conducive to long-term development and improvement; we probably lose a lot of valuable work and ideas that way.

One thing I'm considering as part of developing a new community site is collecting and archiving all of the arclanguage.org content, so we can actually access it. And preserve it, if the site goes down.

Hacker News has an IP unpanning procedure[0] but I don't think Arc Forum has one.

In the Arc 3.1 code there is a function `set-ip-ban` for unbanning users, but no `unban` op.

(Someone should add that to Anarki, actually.)

    (def set-ip-ban (user ip yesno (o info))
      (= (banned-ips* ip) (and yesno (list user (seconds) info)))
      (todisk banned-ips*))

And impacting newbies does not appear to be considered in "focus on and develop our unique points of experimental language hacking". So...

You may not be entirely wrong, but I probably shouldn't have tried to compress a description of a language used and developed by a loosely federated group of unique individuals into a single phrase.

I can try to unpack it a bit...

"Experimental (language) hacking" -> Exploratory programming is supposedly a primary paradigm of arc

"Experimental language hacking" -> Arc isn't exactly production ready; it's a very experimental language, and that makes it fun (and sometimes frustrating) to use, and easier to explore new directions and possibilities. You're less likely to reverently assume that the way it is is the way it must be.