The site is divided into several main types of forums. The tabs at each place are just shortcuts to those pages. The Tips area is a place for other Rubyist to share tips and code snippets that they have found useful and want to share with others. The Talk area is a place for general talk about Ruby, the site,or really anything else on your mind. The Help area is a place to ask and answer questions related to Ruby.

Tags are similar to forum categories except anyone can make a tag as opposed to having a defined set of categories. Tags have 2 main purposes here. For the original poster of a thread, the tags that the person chooses acts as the category/tag for the thread. So if a user's post belongs to the tag rubyonrails and postgresql, then other users can browse via that category/tag to find that post. Tags act as a way for users to sort and search through posts for important information. The second use of tags are to act as bookmarks. Any person can add tags to a particular post, not just the author of the post, that way when users come back to the site, they can view their history and see posts that they have tagged.

RSS is a format used to syndicate news and the content of news-like sites. To find out more information about RSS, please go here.
You can get several different RSS feeds at talk.rubynow.com. We use RSS throughout the site so other Rubyist can keep up to date with what is going on at the site. To see what RSS feeds are available, please go here

XP stands for experience points. When you open up a new account, you will get 25 points. To start a new thread, you will be deducted 5 points. To reply to any thread, you will be deducted 1 point. With the more XP you have, you will be able to vote more on other people's posts. XP is used to rank the quality of your posts with other Rubyists. Even though you are deducted points for posting to the site, it is very easy for you to gain more XP points. When people read your post, they can vote on your post. The more votes that you have, the more XP you will gain.

There are several ways to add and subtract XP. If you post useful information, more people will vote up your posts. If you don't have useful information, then people will down vote your post. Once per day, if you login, there is a random chance of gaining several points. If someone posts a question to the help section and you answer it correctly, you will gain 50 points.

After you have XP, you will be granted with the ability to vote a certain amount of times each day. The amount of votes is calculated based on the experience you have. When you vote on a post, you are signifying whether the post you read is important or not. The more votes a post gets, the more XP points the author of the post will get. If the post has negative points, then the author of the post will lose XP points. Usually, you would vote down a post if it was off-topic, useless, spam, or negative.

The main way to contribute to the site is to ask questions when you need help and help answer people's questions. If you have any tips, then you could also share them.
Also, this site really is a community site and we would appreciate any feedback you have. Please feel free to share any of your ideas to improve the site with us. If the request is reasonable, we will implement the change.

You can only edit your posts within 24 hours of creating it. You can see a list of your currently editable posts at your account home.

The contact page is here