[tomblomfield]

I have no problem with verbs in class (or module) names - I'd actually say we should encapsulate more of this "activity" or "verb" behaviour in single-responsibility objects, and not within ActiveRecord models.

Eg, a ConfirmGrouper.perform object (http://eng.joingrouper.com/blog/2014/03/03/rails-the-missing...)

Uncle Bob's talk gives good reasons for this pattern: http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...

Basically, your data-persistence objects (ActiveRecord models) become more composable because they do fewer things and rely less on associated objects being present to work properly.

Your "interactor" objects which perform "verb"-style activities can also be broken down into very small units with single-responsibility and then composed with each other to perform more complex interactions.

Putting all of this logic into models makes it very very hard to break apart units of behaviour and re-compose them.

This is what I mean by "less coupled, more maintainable"

[phillmv]

>Basically, your data-persistence objects (ActiveRecord models) become more composable because they do fewer things and rely less on associated objects being present to work properly.

I agree with this entirely, and elsewhere in this thread have said so, and I'm not advocating fat models.

I'm more questioning the precise way in which you've chosen to perform your refactoring. To me, that-method-in-partcular seems like a code smell, and I've not been convinced by your blog post compared to the alternate methods I've suggested in my comment. Does that make sense?