
Introducing the new SourceForge - animeseinfeld
https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-the-new-sourceforge/
======
carussell
Logan, I just went through the process to create an account. The signup page
has a few employment related fields that are required to create an account.
They probably shouldn't be.

EDIT: There's also this[1] alignment issue in the settings wrt to "City of
residence" where the text field is off by ~1 pixel.

EDIT2: On the page where I uploaded my SSH key[2], it says updates occur after
a small delay. The linked page in the docs says that this delay is ~30
minutes. In any case, I was able to begin using SSH immediately. If that info
is no longer fresh, I suggest removing it, especially since it's probably a
turnoff for a lot of users.

EDIT3: When I run sf-help --web at the shell, it prints an error:

    
    
        [colbyrussell@shell-22009 ~]$ sf-help --web
        Use of uninitialized value $user in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/sf-help line 96
    

1\. [https://imgur.com/a/2d0lr](https://imgur.com/a/2d0lr)

2\.
[https://sourceforge.net/auth/shell_services](https://sourceforge.net/auth/shell_services)

~~~
loganabbott
Great thanks for the feedback. Looking into it.

------
fuball63
I've been on SourceForge a while, and I really like it. It always looked a
little outdated, and there was the whole malware incident, but for hosting
code with discussion boards and ticket systems, it does the job nicely.

Obviously the malware thing was really bad, but in general I think it gets a
bad rap because it wasn't the trendy new thing. I personally liked the old UI,
but I'm happy for the new change because it's good for the future of the
platform.

~~~
mkroman
May I ask why you don't use any of the alternatives? GitHub, GitLab,
Bitbucket, etc.?

~~~
fuball63
I use sourceforge for games, github for other projects, and bitbucket for
work. It just happened that I had sourceforge first. For the features I use,
they're all pretty much the same... The only "advanced" feature I use is
Travis CI integration on github.

Edit: now that I think of it, ive used a githook in bitbucket too.

------
gitgud
The UI menu really annoys me, the top level reads the following:

    
    
      |Browse|Blog|Deals|Help|Create|Join|Login|
    

Deals? Separate Join and Login? ... Confusing

Then when you scroll down, the top menu changes to:

    
    
      | Articles | Internet Speed Test | Menu |
      |                                       |
      |  BIG AD BANNER                        |
      |                                       |
    

Articles? This is a hosting site, and they have a Blog item already! INTERNET
SPEED TEST??!

I appreciated Sourceforge and it was a big part of my gateway experience into
opensource, but now it just looks like an amateur startup :(

------
mgbmtl
If anyone from Gitlab is listening: github sync is a really important feature
for FOSS projects. Glad that SourceForge implemented it.

(In a large-ish FOSS project, we are trying to move to self-hosted Gitlab, but
the lack of sync means that people have to fully buy-in or manually sync their
extensions/modules, which is causing major friction)

~~~
connorshea
We have repository mirroring available in GitLab Enterprise Edition Starter,
and there exists an issue to move this to CE[0] but it was closed with some
explanation as to why[1]. I assume with GitHub Sync you're asking for syncing
of more than just the repository, but also issues and merge/pull requests?

The SourceForge sync tool appears to only include release syncing as far as I
can tell (the wording is ambiguous and the docs only mention import, not
active sync, so I'm not sure what they provide?).

For what it's worth, GitLab does have import tools in CE[2]. You can also use
repository mirroring (along with any other Enterprise Edition features) if
you're an open source project on GitLab.com.

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/18732](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18732) [1]:
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/18732#note_47...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/18732#note_47932513) [2]:
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html)

~~~
mgbmtl
I would be happy with something that does a regular plain pull of all branches
and tags. As a first step, it would make it easier to declare our Gitlab
instance as the canonical source for all official contrib code (a bit like
Drupal.org and WordPress do).

We could duct tape a solution, or coerce people to do it manually, but we
manage a lot of custom scripts already, which we hope to deprecate thanks to
Gitlab. It also affects negatively the perception that we are using the right
tool for the job. Our community is divided between those who want to use only
Github, and those who want to avoid depending on it.

We currently have around 300 active users, and we are projecting around 500
users next year (as we move more and more projects into it). At
USD$40/user/year, that would be between $12k to $20k/year? Our project is
oriented at non-profits, and everything runs on small margins, lots of
volunteers. We can afford some financial support, but not $12k/year. I wrote
to Gitlab sales but never received a response.

(apologies for the off-topic)

~~~
sytse
I'm sorry to hear that sales didn't follow up and will mention this to our
Chief Revenue Officer. Right now we don't have a non-profit program. BTW For
open source projects GitLab.com Gold is free.

~~~
mgbmtl
Thank you for your response and followup. I really appreciate Gitlab.com, I
participate in some smaller projects that use it. For the main project I work
on (CiviCRM.org), however, self-hosting is an important factor.

It's not so much about being a non-profit, but being an open source project.
It's difficult to budget with a per-person fee (considering 70% of people
might post on our gitlab only once or twice per year). How would it work if
Debian or Gnome adopted Gitlab EE?

------
minxomat
Nice work, I really didn't expect anything despite Logan promising
improvements time and time again via twitter. Excited for the GitHub sync (not
import).

Also, the awesome SF hosting (SSL and a SQL DB included), much better than GH
Pages IMO.

~~~
fhood
I'm glad you say that, because I have always viewed sourceforge as slightly
sketchy, but without any real justification. I just knew that I was supposed
to have mixed feelings about it.

~~~
loganabbott
Glad to hear it too!

------
sigzero
Kudos! Keep improving. The source hosting "business" isn't a zero sum game.
Everyone benefits from choice and competition.

------
kyriakos
Good job. Github sync means you can host binaries on sourceforge and keep the
source on github as usual?

~~~
loganabbott
Yes that is correct. It syncs (copies) binaries from GH to SF, doesn't touch
code.

~~~
mrtweetyhack
So you're stealing binaries from GH and calling it your own? Sort of like what
every download site already does. "Every day, SourceForge sees over a million
visitors and serves 4.5 million software downloads." So everyday a user on
average downloads 4.5 software packages? I highly doubt your numbers.
Personally, I've downloaded perhaps 5 within the last year and I am an rabid
consumer of OSS. I am not impressed with your performance.

~~~
caf
The binaries in question aren't GH's _or_ SF's, they're the project's, and
since this synching is under the project's control, I don't see the problem.

------
anowlcalledjosh
Has nobody in the design team ever tested this on a screen at less than 4K? At
1366×768 the title is jammed right up against the left edge of the screen.

------
alkonaut
I applaud the initiative but when I look at what happened to Slashdot, I’m not
enthusiastic about Sourceforge succeeding any better under the same ownership
(I have no idea whether Slashdot makes money but it’s a horrible community
these days, and nothing seems to be done about it.)

~~~
PacoFromBrazil
I share the same feelings.

I used Slashdot for many years, starting when Rob Malda ran the site. The past
year or so has been the worst, in my opinion, even when considering the Beta
era of discontent.

The stories used to be primarily about tech (or related subjects), with a
minor focus on politics. But lately I think it has been the opposite. There is
much more emphasis on general politics, with tech being a minor focus, in my
opinion.

While I'm not very interested in politics to begin with, what bothers me the
most is how partisan I think things have gotten. The stories have what I
consider a rather left-wing bias. The same goes for the modding, where I think
it's common to see centrist and right-wing comments often downmodded, even
when they express a very reasonable and relevant set of ideas.

I feel that Slashdot has moved from perhaps being an open, varied, quasi-
libertarian environment to one that's much less open, much less diverse, and
much less enjoyable.

So I stopped visiting it about a month ago, and I don't miss it at all.

~~~
strictnein
> The stories used to be primarily about tech (or related subjects), with a
> minor focus on politics. But lately I think it has been the opposite. There
> is much more emphasis on general politics, with tech being a minor focus, in
> my opinion.

I left for basically the same reason, but quite a while ago. I forget which of
the editors it was, but he would interject politics into everything. And even
after people asked for a politics section (which could then be turned off), to
keep politics out of the tech stuff, he would still put political stuff all
over the place.

------
shadowtree
Sad state of affairs that something like ScourceForge cannot operate as a
paid-for service, but only as a "tech-influencer" ad site. quote from here:
[https://slashdotmedia.com/about-slashdot-
media/](https://slashdotmedia.com/about-slashdot-media/)

Not attacking the Abbotts and their SlashDotMedia and BizX web media
influencer conglomerate, 100% legitimate way of doing business, but an overall
observation on services that can't be operated as standalone businesses.

Also an illustration how big the tech dependency on advertising is, from
Google to this. Remove ads from the web and a shitload of stuff disappears.

~~~
loganabbott
It's something we're trying to come up with solutions for, so that we can
reduce or eliminate ads on SourceForge. But for now, any user or developer who
creates an account on SourceForge will never see ads.

------
hanley
Looks like a good list of features, except for the HTML5 Speedtest. Why was
that needed?

~~~
loganabbott
We had built it for another internal project before we acquired SourceForge,
so we decided to release it on SourceForge since people seemed to like it.

------
boyter
Nice. A large improvement. Have been waiting for this for a while since it was
announced that it was sold.

No idea if anyone working on sourceforge is likely to be here or not but I
would love to know if I could get an API of the projects there or even just a
list. I would like to add more of souceforge into searchcode.com and would
prefer to not scrape the site.

------
scruffyherder
Probably far too late to mention, but I have a bunch of projects on SF, and
now I can't scroll through them on the me drop down menu.

It feels.. strange, and more responsive than the old stuff. I guess that's
just change.

I never was a fan of github, I always preferred the geodistribution of SF, and
of course it was so easy to make binary packages for end users. It's a shame
the other people had to ruin a great place with selling the adware space, and
Im so glad it's all gone.

I just fear in this environment of hipster flash with no substance, that a
well rounded site like SF will never get the hipster VC financing that github
does.

I hope you guys don't shutter any time soon, I love SF!

------
nik736
They should hire a new lead designer.

------
minxomat
Any plans on expanding:

\- the ticket system (connectors to external systems, boards, etc.)

\- CI connectors

\- integrations for team systems (Slack, MS Teams, ...)

~~~
loganabbott
Yes definitely. Second half of 2018.

------
iwanttodie
To loganabbott--

The new design looks pretty good, or at least more modern. Also I just wanted
to emphasize with you that you had to field the same "do you still bundle
malware" question...eight times by my count.

~~~
loganabbott
Thanks. I am aware.

------
jhallenworld
I notice that there is no automatic spell checking in edit boxes, for example
when someone creates a bug ticket. Github has this.

Any plans to add this feature? Or is there a control to enable it that I'm
missing?

~~~
hk__2
Isn’t that handled by your browser rather than GitHub?

~~~
jhallenworld
Apparently it's a bug with the markdown editor they are using:

[https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/7954/](https://forge-
allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/7954/)

------
wodenokoto
I got into SVC / code repositories after the whole sourceforge serves malware
debacle, so I'm not familiar with SF from a developer perspective.

Is it a got repo? Mercurial? Something else completely?

------
bla2
I for one am excited about this. I used to have stuff on sourceforge, and to
me it feels like they're on track to become relevant again.

------
mmsimanga
Anecdotal. I find Sourceforge has more end-user applications. By this I mean
applications you can download, install and have a user interface. A good
example is Squirrel SQL[1]. Github seems to be a coders repository. Filled
with libraries to incorporate into other programs.

[1][https://sourceforge.net/projects/squirrel-
sql/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/squirrel-sql/)

------
ianamartin
Well, at least it's not as mind-punchingly slow as it used to be. Progress?

------
MikkoFinell
Wasn't it sourceforge that injected malware into downloaded programs? At least
that's what pops into my head every time I see a sourceforge link, and why I
avoid anything that's hosted on there.

~~~
loganabbott
It was, but we ended that practice immediately after acquiring SourceForge in
2016. More info in the OP or in an AMA I did here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/)

~~~
lucb1e
From that link:

> My company acquired SourceForge

It's interesting how often you mention they were acquired by someone else but
not by whom. It cannot be a secret, but you don't seem to want the parent
company known either.

I just spent an hour going down the rabbit hole. Every time I click the "owned
by" link, another "owned by" reference appears.

~~~
knightofmars
They were acquired by "Dice.com".

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131208023450/http://www.h-onli...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131208023450/http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Dice-
Holdings-acquires-Slashdot-and-SourceForge-1711181.html)

~~~
loganabbott
Dice.com is who acquired SourceForge a handful of years ago. My company (BIZX)
acquired SourceForge from DICE.

~~~
sundarurfriend
> Dice.com is who acquired SourceForge a handful of years ago.

And you could say their ethics were rather... _dicey_.

(Forgive me.)

------
Paperweight

      position: sticky; /* Frames are back, baby! */

------
choward
Atrocious. They lock a pointless navigation bar to the top and changed the
theme. Can someone explain why I would ever want to use this product. They
bundled adware with their software ffs. Inexcusable. They need to just die.

~~~
Osiris
In the announcement: "Removed bundled adware from projects". At least it's a
step forward.

~~~
choward
The fact that they were okay with doing that to begin with is what concerns
me.

------
usernam
Whoa there: fixed top banner with an actual banner at the top, covering a
whopping 20% of my screen height and 80% of width. Didn't see something like
this in a long time.

I'm never going to interact through that as a developer on daily basis. Not
even considering the poor UI for just every feature in SF.

The only thing SF has for it, currently, is a mailing list for each project.
GitHub and GitLab should have this. Interaction and discussion though "issues"
is horrible.

~~~
benstrumental
> GitHub and GitLab should have this. Interaction and discussion though
> "issues" is horrible.

Agreed. It would be a huge win for GitHub or GitLab to provide this service.
There really are no great alternatives beyond hosting a mailman server
yourself.

~~~
vonnieda
Google Groups works well for this. I use it for my open source projects. You
can interact with it via the web, if you want, but it also has a full mailman
style interface, which is how I use it.

------
aphextron
Brought to you by Google AdSense

What exactly is "new" besides the brutally awful design and color scheming? I
see the same malware laden downloads that can be found anywhere else on the
internet, surrounded by ads as was there before. Over 600 separate HTTP
requests and counting on a project page? Really? You seriously expect
developers to use this?

~~~
Twirrim
For what it's worth, they've been bought out since the malware thing happened,
and one of the first things they did was cut that shit out.

But holy crap this is terrible. 101 requests while using an adblocker, 116
without. Of those requests I count 62 of them being to download Javascript.
More than half?!

Out of curiosity, retried using pingdom's tools:
[https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/z7f8e/https://sourceforge.net/p...](https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/z7f8e/https://sourceforge.net/projects/moodle/?source=directory)

It gets a solid D, unsurprisingly. They saw over 200 requests, 43% were
javascript calls, and javascript made up more than 52% of the final page
content loaded. That's just nuts, considering what the site actually is.

I don't like to pick on websites and developers that much, but holy crap what
were they thinking? Did they even consider what the experience is like outside
of their dev laptop or using a fast network?

~~~
zmix
I am logged in.

I got 7 ad-warnings on "uBlock Origin" and the page is lean.

~~~
Twirrim
Open up the network debugger (Tools -> Web Developer -> Network in Firefox,
View->Developer->Developer Tools -> Network in Chrome), do a forced reload and
see what you get.

Even logged in I still get a ridiculous number of things loaded. The biggest
culprits look to be the foundation javascript stuff (I'm assuming that's a
javascript framework) being loaded from fsdn.com. Every request made, hurts,
unless you're lucky to be using HTTP/2.0 (they don't support 2.0), and even
then you've got to think about interpreter starting/loading/parsing/executing
time. For every script.

They're also passing parameters in the javascript urls (e.g.
handlebars.js?1515608140) which really meddles with caching etc.

The latency situation gets even worse if you're anywhere but on a fast
connection (so lots of end users in their global target market).

I like the overall look of the new site, but it's a performance nightmare.

------
yellowpug
surprised SourceForge is still alive

------
mrtweetyhack
A case of too little and WAY too late. Sourceforge is like the Myspace, long
dead. It's not even a good try.

------
partycoder
SourceForge uses very invasive ads.

------
jasonmaydie
I hope they got rid of the guy who suggested bundling installers

~~~
loganabbott
They're no longer at SourceForge.

------
krisives
Glad to see they are removing their adware from packages. I believe the damage
is already done though and nobody will trust a binary from that place ever
again.

~~~
loganabbott
Just focused on doing right by the 1 million daily users that come to
SourceForge to download one of 430,000 projects hosted there.

