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Comment by dicknuckle | Hacker News Reader

it was but someone bought it and turned everything around.

Citation needed. The website is still as horrific to use as in times past. It might not have outright malware anymore, but that doesn't make it less painful.

I don't know the current status of SourceForce, but the problem wasn't one of usability of the website.

The problem is that it had a change of owners, and the new owners started bundling non-free spyware and malware into the installers of otherwise free software. Which is way more serious than simply having a website that is hard to navigate.

SourceForge got a well deserved backlash from the community following their underhanded tactics. Not sure what the situation is now.

SourceForge stopped including spyware and malware installers near the beginning of 2016 when new owners took over.

At no point did I say it didn't have malware, in fact, I explicitly acknowledged it.

Yes, but you stressed the (bad) usability of their website, which, while not good, is/was not their biggest sin and pales in comparison.

Here is a post from a couple of years ago by Logan Abbott, the current president of SourceForge:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20750707

At no point did I say it didn't have malware, in fact, I explicitly acknowledged it. I have no interest in reading the comments of that person -- regardless, they already butt-in unrequited to a twitter thread I was in to do some weird PR bullshit.

You wrote "Citation needed" on a topic about malware and even your "acknowledgment" wasn't even that clear as you wrote "It might not have outright malware" - something is either malware or isn't.

So i gave you an answer from the person who is in the best position to answer it.

> they already butt-in unrequited to a twitter thread I was in to do some weird PR bullshit

How is that relevant to this discussion? Nobody even mentioned twitter.

As for the UX, yes it isn't great, nobody claimed it was. But they did make an attempt to improve it, here is how it looked when they bought it (some random project page):

http://web.archive.org/web/20161108001911/https://sourceforg...

(now if the new one is an improvement or not i'm not sure, i think the new one has more user-oriented information "above the fold" despite being larger in size but overall the difference isn't that big)

> You wrote "Citation needed" on a topic about malware

Asking for a citation isn't itself denial

> How is that relevant to this discussion? Nobody even mentioned twitter.

The CEO of sourceforge is so desperate to say it doesn't contain malware that they butt into twitter threads to do unrequited PR.

> But they did make an attempt to improve it, here is how it looked when they bought it (some random project page):

Which is objectively more usable from a UX standpoint than it's current interface.

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