Yeah, Ruby's website is awful. Even Ruby on Rails' website is pretty bad. They don't make it look nearly as awesome as it actually is.

As an outsider, I think RubyonRails.org is doing a pretty good job.

The install instructions are pretty good, links to documentation and books are good, the screencasts are kept up to date and are IMHO awesome, the blog is active.

What else could you want? I mean, yeah, the Rails Guides could use some more effort as I found them lacking, but it's a lot better than nothing at all (as it used to be).

I don't think rubyonrails.org is too bad, but it could still do with some updates. For example, it doesn't recommend railsinstaller.org to the Windows folks, even though that's the quickest, one-shot way to install the entire Rails and Ruby stack on Windows.

And I don't think linking to a tarball with the Ruby source should be the first link to getting Ruby.. there are tutorials they could link to that would be more useful to newcomers.

Nonetheless, rubyonrails.org is better updated than ruby-lang.org in any case, and provides a better model to follow IMHO.

I wouldn't put too much effort in judging a language or a community based on the free, unpaid-for, unmaintained website. If you look at the Ruby community, and I include Rails, Sinatra and Padrino folks as well, you'll see that the majority of the activity takes places in more of a social setting, examples being http://rubygems.org/gems/gemcutter and http://github.com and the great podcasts from folks like Peter Cooper, et al.

The time for engaging through a one-way webpage has long passed.

I actually agree with this, and feel that any sort of official site should link out to others as quickly as possible (rather than be a monolithic resource). Having some sort of official site is useful, however, since there are lot of people who aren't familiar with the modern ways and who will be looking at the official site for guidance. Currently those people are getting told RubyForge is the greatest thing since sliced bread..