As was mentioned, we have a hosted offering planned so people can set up a forum in a few clicks.
But besides that we actively want to work to make Ruby apps easier to install. Right now they're too hard and we're going to try and fix that.
At the very least we'll offer VM images and install scripts for various cloud hosts.
Awesome! I was trying to point out to someone that this is a critical market-share-limiting factor for Rails apps the other day. It's good to know that someone's devoting time to the problem.
For an example of the difficulty of installing Rails apps, take a look at the length of the installation guide for Gitlab [1]. There are seven numbered steps, some of which involve multiple commands. Upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 was about the same complexity.
Thanks to the thoroughness of its author, the guide largely worked as advertised. But being able to install and upgrade with apt-get would have saved me hours.
Please also keep in mind making it easy for people to upgrade your app -- that's just as important as installing it.
[1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/stable/doc/install...