So. The issue:
I couldn't get the radio_button or check_box tags to work with rails. They kept telling me:

wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)


Which didn't make any sense since I was supplying arguments correctly. I eventually tried making a radio_button in a different view and it worked fine. I found out that it was rails calling the Group model and probably communicating with ActiveRecord to the database that was causing me problems. So I backed up my application and started playing around with it.

What I was trying to do was get that column (the name of the column is "open" and it's in a table called "groups") to act like a boolean value to determine whether or not the group was a public or private group. Rails is supposed to allow it to act like that and I'm pretty sure scaffolds are even formed with a True/False select field thingie because I had done it before... so I set off to make that scaffold and try to get it to do that so I could just copy the code since clearly radio_button wasn't working.

So I created the scaffold.. tried to anyway:

>ruby script\generate scaffold Group

Didn't work.. so I tried variations: "scaffold group groups" "scaffold group" etc etc.. nothing worked. Commandline kept giving me "wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)" errors as well. Eventually I became distraught and tried to get RadRails to help me via its GUI for generators. Luckily the terminal gave me some more specific output:

Before updating scaffolding from new DB schema, try creating a table for your model (Group)


But my table was created. So I tried doing it in a different database.. same result.. then I tried doing it with a different table.. seemed to work.. so then I determined of course that something was wrong with my beautiful table.

I had recently added a column to it called "open". I decided to play around with that one. I changed the length from "1" to "3" just to see if it was the auto boolean thing rails does screwing up. Yep.. made it work. But I needed it to be bool. So I tried changing the column name. Yep. That worked too.

I let #rubyonrails on freenode know and at that same time CapnDeviance was reading something about reserved words. Yes.. that's "open" you see in that ticket.

So A_Bloke decided to update the reserved words page on the rubyonrails wiki and I thought I would write this up just so people searching for these errors online might find a solution to their problem.

Anyway.. my page works now and now I can use radio_button, check_box or whatever the hell else I want and it acts as boolean. Woohoo