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Comment by owyn | Hacker News Reader

Sourceforge was great back in the day when it was the only (?) option for public code hosting besides running your own site, but it's not as "cool" now... it feels like most projects have left, only abandoned projects remain. Putting a "new" project there seems strange. I don't know if that's due to functionality or not though, maybe it's just that the UI feels dated. Even with free offerings, people pay attention to the usability and UI, and although I've never run a project using sourceforge, I don't think I'd ever choose (or recommend) it over github or bitbucket. I'd love to hear reasons why I'm wrong on that opinion?

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There are valid reasons not to use sourceforge.

You know, each sf project can have a "homepage" link, and I once spent half an hour searching for where to change it. I kid you not.

I have searched for 10 minutes on how to reply to a bug report and attach a patch. I gave up in the end.

I'm still the owner of a dead project on sourceforge. I've tried several times to delete that project, but there was always something that prevented me from doing it (I don't recall, I think the project had a mailing list, and I didn't have permission to delete the mailing list, and I couldn't delete the project without first deleting the mailing list. Or something.).

sourceforge simply isn't usable. The makers know that, which is why they do a big redesign/relaunch every two years or so -- but each one makes it worse.

I had a conversation with a senior engineer on SourceForge where he pointed out that most people forget that developers are actually a minority of their business: most of their users are nontechnical people that come to them to download binaries of things like zip utilities.

It may be true that download users are their business, but developers certainly are the drivers of the site. They produce the content.

Even then, the downloading experience is warped straight from the 90s.

Do you know any alternative to SourceForge?

SourceForge allows to host phpBB, Wordpress, MediaWiki, my custom php code, with gigabytes of disk space.

It's not possible to install all this software on Github or Google Code project.

Perhaps that's why SourceForge is so bloated; it's trying to wear too many hats. GitHub and Google Code both give you a issue board, wiki, and site host; but it's all integrated and their ops teams don't have to worry about random 3rd-party software going haywire since they own it all.

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