This makes me feel old because I can honestly not remember whether SF has always been the steaming pile of sht it is today (before and after the redesign) or whether there was a brief period back in 200? where it was genuinely usable.

I do remember that at some point in history the downloads worked as expected with curl and wget. Then they invented the idiotic spoiler page with microscopic download links and for a long time the URLs were not working with wget (this has been fixed about a year ago, iirc - the idiotic spoiler page is still there, though).

I also remember that the mailing list archives and bugtrackers have always been as unusable as they still seem to be.

All I can say is: Die sourceforge, please just die. The days when "free CVS" was an argument are over. For as long as I can remember I have cringed in agony whenever I stumbled into yet another sourceforge download page. They are the plague. The new lipstick doesn't help at all. It just happens that the site that always felt like those shareware scams now also looks like one.

It's 2009, we have github, launchpad, google code and a dozen other OSS hosting providers. All of them beat SF hands down. Please don't use sourceforge. Thanks.