SourceForge.net Gets A Makeover | Hacker News Reader

SourceForge.net Gets A Makeover

sourceforge.net

43 pointsolalonde23 comments

Why do they have FullSync on the front page? Last file update: 2005-03-08. Review page [1] has loads of mentions of non-running, non-syncing, and "too buggy to depend on". Not exactly a stellar project to be featuring so highly.

Meanwhile, it seems their navigation hasn't really changed, just received a new coat of paint. On the ScummVM pages, for instance: still shows 5 items in the main nav, unless support / develop is clicked. Then 4 more menu items and breadcrumbs appear, mouse-over menus on develop and the new ones, "support" changes to "donate", "share" appears out of nowhere, and the styling changes (different mouse-over font color on the navbar, for no reason). They also still have the crappy click-to-reload-the-page-to-navigate on the download-files list, side-by-side diff doesn't show word / character changes, just by line, and anything to do with the repo (browser, patches, etc) is a complete style and layout change from the rest of the site.

Put it back in the oven, it's not done yet.

[1]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fullsync/reviews/?sort=usefu...

I worked there a little over a year ago and in that time they had 3-4 'makeovers'. In the same time they had like a 90% staff turnover including the CEO and a lot of upper management.

Interesting redesign. In 2009 they did a previous redesign, which Chris Wanstrath from GitHub critiqued at RailsConf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUUvq48Gb3w (Around 17:45). It looks like they've improved since then, but I couldn't even create a project, the system gave me a 400. Also, the site seems really slow, but possibly that's because they just relaunched.

While they get a lot of flak because they have supposedly lost to GitHub, I'll admit that far more people have heard of SourceForge compared the GitHub, and I must applaud their willingness to at least attempt a major redesign.

Seems a shame one of their homepage 'featured' projects (ScummVM) has just moved to github.

http://www.scummvm.org/news/20110212/ http://github.com/scummvm/scummvm

IMO, the most useful page is pretty well hidden (you have to search an empty string): http://sourceforge.net/search/

And should probably go to the right of the Search button as "All Projects" or "Most Popular"

Seems like a lot of the useful content is hidden. I had hopes that they had learned from GitHub, but it still takes multiple clicks to see any code.

Too little, too late. Github has won.

My feelings exactly. SF still looks like some cheap JIRA install, not a hacker-friendly user-facing site like GitHub.

I get the impression they're undermanned, underfunded and under the weight of their technical debt. You just can't do all the cool things GitHub can when you're supporting SVN (do they still do CVS too?).

They support cvs, svn, git, hg, and bzr. Very impressive.

Overall their website navigation seems to be heaps better. I know this rewrite has been a long time coming. I know it's also been done in python, and by some quite good developers - so I'm guessing they will progress faster now (assuming they all still have jobs).

I'm happy to not bury SF just yet, just in case Oracle or someone of that ilk decide to send a few suitcases filled with money to the GitHub guys.

On this front, I think SourceForge deserves a lot of respect. They've weathered acquisitions, had to find monetization methods, and through it all they've remained dedicated supporters of Open Source. The amount of money and effort they've invested in Open Source development infrastructure is admirable.

It's not beautiful, and it's got a lot of warts...but SF.net has its heart in the right place, which is something github has not yet proven.

I'm not sure there are enough network effects to make it a winner take all market. Especially since systems like git make it so very easy to migrate elsewhere.

Uh you're high. You're in a bubble...

Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Anet...

Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=sourceforge.net,+github....

Alexa: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...;

By what measure are you talking about? Ah of course. The "It's shiny new so hot right now within my small circle of friends!" metric.

Is "projects moving to github" good enough measure for you?

Only if it's backed up by data, but traffic is increasing to sourceforge, not decreasing.

The vast majority of the traffic that hits Sourceforge is there to download software, not contribute to the projects. When we spoke to them a few years ago, they said their main competitor was Downloads.com not us (GitHub).

Don't get too caught up using graphs to assume relevancy, Myspace still gets a lot of traffic.

and traffic = mindshare = $$$

My point was that "Github has won against sf" is a rather naive comment.

And as you rightly point out, github and sourceforge aren't really in competing markets anyway - making the original comment even more nonsensical.

> Don't get too caught up using graphs to assume relevancy, Myspace still gets a lot of traffic.

Also not sure what you mean. Traffic == relevancy. If something gets a lot of users, surely by the definition of the word, it's 'relevant'.

Sounds like crazy valley bubble talk to me.

Well, probably not according to the stats.

But for me, personally, Github has won, I prefer it when projects have a Github repo

We use both. SourceForge brings to the table a huge distribution network. Webmin burns terabytes of transfer for millions of downloads every year. I'm not sure github is even in the game on that front, are they? They also host the webmin.com domain, for the time being, which saves us some bandwidth, as well.

But, we never used the VCS at SourceForge, and we barely touch the forums and bug tracker...if we could turn them off, we would.

The new design looks much better than the previous. I digg it.

I am sad that you got downvoted because you have a discenting opinion. I am curious though, what do you like about the new design? More whitespace? Better color choice? New features?

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