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Comment by chrisvxd | Hacker News Reader

Almost all the comments here seem to be comparing SourceForge to GitHub, but (pre-DevShare) I always liked sourceforge as a consumer site, which is clearly not GitHub's area. Sure, there were some dev-orientated projects, but what made it great for me was the huge library of free, opensource and ACCESSIBLE consumer-facing software, like GIMP.

Then again, this is HN.

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Is it not? You can have GitHub pages for your project if you wish. Static website with no ads or malware added.

Sure it's not like editing couple input boxes, but SF UX never was good. Even as developer I found navigating SF painful (back then when it was the primary hosting location). I can't imagine it was much better for the average user.

I applaud the commitment, but I think SF should remain dead. It must be a lesion for anyone considering similar actions. The trust is non-existent, there are better alternatives and the world has moved on.

I think the best course of action is to put that commitment and people into a new name, better product and help those few projects still hosted on SF to migrate.

SourceForge still receives 35 million visitors per month so it'd have to "die" to "remain dead". We're going to focus on ridding it of everything that hurt its reputation, and we're already on our way. We're also going to focus on supporting the tens of thousands of developers that rely on SourceForge. People can use archive.org if they want a "lesion" for anyone considering similar actions as the old SourceForge.

I wanted to write it before, but skipped. 35 million page views is not usage. My guess is that you have considerably less sessions with more than 1 page view. I doubt there are more than 5k active projects (again, not the ones used by 1 person).

There are a lot of links to SourceForge on the web. As someone in the thread pointed out there are even spammers abusing it. People clicking on the links and making "sessions" doesn't constitute actual usage.

I doubt anyone in this thread uses SourceForge for hosting. I am not. And I wouldn't recommend it. If I asked my peers if they use it I'm certain that not a single person would say "Yes".

So yes, in my eyes it's dead.

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Oh I just opened the site and there are statistics on main page. 600 bug reports and 12k commits per week across all of the hosted projects is not really a big number. 10th most recently updated project was updated 1 month ago. Yes there are still some fairly large projects hosted (probably only for distribution) on SF and they receive considerable amount of downloads, but they're only there because they have been on SF for ages.

Without fresh blood, those projects are just the last breath of SourceForge.

Sincerely good luck. My point was that not only you have to fix the past, but also deliver better product. The market is quite saturated, people have choices, the end users are more tech savvy with higher standards, developers expect much more as well.

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