There are many web development shops that are switching to Ruby on Rails, and this is generally a good thing – lots of new exposure to a great language, which means more tools and documentation and development by the growing community.
Now, when a development studio switches to Rails, the one thing you shouldn’t do is try your best to move all your tools over to Rails. Just because Rails is new and cool doesn’t mean that PHP and/or Perl and/or Python are all ugly and should be avoided at any cost. As always, best practice is to use the best tool for the job.
I mention this because I’ve noticed that Lighthouse has chosen to use Beast, a sleek and relatively new Rails-based forum for their support. I’ve experimented with Beast, and I love it! The glaring problem I saw when evaluating Beast for our own use here at lunardawn is that it doesn’t have *any* spam protection, as seen at the spam-filled Lighthouse support. It wouldn’t take much at all to integrate with Akismet to block most spam, and admittedly I could have patched Beast as such pretty fast, but we want to use the best tool for the job while taking away as little development time from our core product as possible.
So for us, we’re looking at either phpBB, which has a large community dedicated to anti-spam measures, or lussumo’s Vanilla, which seems to avoid spam at the moment solely based on its small market share (obviously not scalable to any degree).
