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Comment by usernam | Hacker News Reader

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.

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If you had been able to read it, you would have seen that removing ads for developers is exactly one of the new parts. That makes them on par with stack overflow, which seems fair.

* Removed bundled adware from projects

* Implemented malware scans for every single project on SourceForge

* Built an HTML5 speed test

* Added multi-factor authentication

* Created an ad reporting tool and team to eliminate bad and/or deceptive ads

* Removed ads for developers (logged in users will not see any ads)

* Added HTTPS support for project website hosting

> * Removed bundled adware from projects

This is like a restaurant advertising "we've stopped intentionally poisoning our food!"

They don't deserve any chances after that. They're done.

But the person that buys the restaurant and reopens it and puts up an "under new management" sign deserves a chance. That's what happened here.

They should change the name too. I still feel repulsive seeing SourceForge link and never download anything from there. Reputation is easy to lose but very hard to fix,so I'm surprised the new owners chose this path.

We have an issue for mailing lists in GitLab here[0] if you want to leave any comments, but it's not a particularly active issue and I'm not sure how likely we'd be to actually build this into the product. I'll update this comment if I find a more active/fleshed-out issue for the same functionality.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4272

My take:

- Add a bunch of hooks into GitLab that allow it to "hand-off" at sensible points to a list server such as Mailman

- Mailman has a huge Python API (http://mailmanclient.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). The biggest potential gain is likeliest to come from the people who want this coming up with the integrations themselves, but the roadblock there is lack of knowledge of GitLab's internals

- I'm not sure what the best way would be to handle #2. I wonder how good the community's mental model of GitLab is.

I was gonna come here to complain about the poor UI. I don't think a lot of thought went into the information architecture here. Internet speed test is a top-level nav item?

The download stats are misleading too -- the top 2 projects are MS's truetype fonts and an old (outdated) Notepad++ plugin repo that is encouraging you to go to Github instead.

I can't think of a good reason to use SourceForge for anything.

> 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.

What about something like MailChimp?

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.

If you're logged in you don't see any ads.

If you're looking for a discussion forum integrated with GitHub issues (BitBucket and GitLab too), you can check out my little tool I launched quite recently.

https://www.elseif.net

Great domain.

For what it's worth, you can respond to GitHub issues via the notification emails you get sent. That's kind of like a mailinglist.

I've never really needed to interact with devs much, so I'm quite naive on mailinglists vs issues. The biggest thing I guess I see missing with modern systems is the lack of threading.

What capabilities/benefits do mailinglists have over modern approaches? What functionality has been lost?

Interaction though mailing lists is far far far far far worse then even the mess issues is.

Mailing lists are completely terrible for anything.

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