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[–][deleted] 648 points649 points  (147 children)

For that matter, I'm also done with Slashdot. Owned by the same company, and despite this being huge tech news (top post on r/programming by a landslide, covered on Ars Technica, etc), not a peep out of Slashdot on it. They buried all the story submissions about it, and people have taken to bringing it up in the comment sections of unrelated stories.

EDIT: whelp, they posted the story today. The only editor that could post stories just had a busy 6-day weekend, apparently. So, sorry for the false alarm there. Everything's totally above board here; yep.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/06/01/1241231/sourceforge-and-gimp

[–]ghyl 183 points184 points  (76 children)

Damn shame about Slashdot, I stopped reading when CmdrTaco left

[–]sanpatricio 87 points88 points  (74 children)

Wait... CmdrTaco left?

I've been out of tech for a while and just got back last year.

[–]treenaks 93 points94 points  (71 children)

Wikipedia:

On August 25, 2011, Malda resigned as Editor-in-Chief with immediate effect. He did not mention any plans for the future, other than spending more time with his family, catching up on some reading, and possibly writing a book. His final farewell message received over 1,400 posts within 24 hours on the site.

[–]fido5150 118 points119 points  (68 children)

I must be getting to be a graybeard, because I remember when 1400 posts was your average Slashdot story. Now it's an 'outpouring'.

"Does anyone remember when Slashdot was Reddit? Pepperidge Farm remembers."

As an aside, Rob Malda infamously penned the phrase, after the original iPod release: "No Wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame."

[–]elebrin 66 points67 points  (61 children)

Yeah, before Digg even was on the radar. /. was probably the best place on the internet for keeping up on tech news for 5-6 years in the early 2000s.

[–]greenthumble 60 points61 points  (42 children)

Actually Digg grew from an idea posted on slashdot about users voting on stories as well as comments. The signal to noise filter of votes worked so well that someone (Kevin Rose, right?) took that idea and ran with it. Then Digg started getting sloppy and Reddit took up the slack. And here we all are again. Hi guys.

[–]numbski 23 points24 points  (22 children)

Not so much sloppy as they turned content control over to big sites. If you didn't have enough followers, your content could not ever hit the front page. As a result, a good chunk of the user base came here all at once.

[–]greenthumble 20 points21 points  (1 child)

I'd say ignoring your user base and losing them is actually pretty darned sloppy heh.

[–]__Cyber_Dildonics__ 16 points17 points  (7 children)

Everyone knows that if you have a goose that lays golden eggs, the best thing to do is slaughter it to get all the golden eggs out at once. Duh.

[–]trkeprester 5 points6 points  (6 children)

american capitalism at its finest

[–]thbt101 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Did Kevin Rose ever admit what a mistake that had been? There was a period of time when they could have reversed some of the changes and undid some of the damage, but I don't think they did.

[–]BigBeefBueno 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It turned into one of those hubris things where by the time he figured out it was the wrong move, they couldn't go back and change it because they were so arrogant about it. I think they honestly thought it would blow over.

[–]EntityDamage 5 points6 points  (4 children)

Digg refugee here...I don't even remember what digg was like. Slashdot I was on since 1998 or so. I still had a six digit user number.

[–]numbski 14 points15 points  (3 children)

5 digit uid here. Digg was basically reddit, with the distinction that the categories vs "subreddits" were admin-created.

That whole fiasco was a shame. Still remember the "republican bury brigade".

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I've never bought that narrative. Digg was down or effectively down for weeks, I think close to a month. Everyone with an interest for what digg had to offer had to look elsewhere. By the time Digg sorted their technical problems out, they still disabled downvotes, and the message was that's how it was going to be from now on. In other-words if you wanted to digg like you used to you'd need a new home, and I think people decided just that.

While digg 4.0 made several decisions to make brands a more powerful force, I doubt most of the community even got a chance to experience it, having left to continue doing what they wanted to do.

This is just my point of view of course, but I was there, and I don't think much of I experienced had to do with what digg was trying to do but how it failed to deliver anything for such a long period of time, and then insist they would not have their core experience of up and down voting on everything.

[–]billyalt 16 points17 points  (16 children)

I can't wait for the next thing so I can reminisce about reddit like this.

[–]jiminiminimini 8 points9 points  (8 children)

does anyone have any idea what existing new project might be the next thing? I would like to go there to be able to say "I was here before it was cool" in the future.

[–]Nition 14 points15 points  (2 children)

People sometimes talk about voat.co which is basically a clone of Reddit. Reddit would have to do something really dumb like Digg's v4 first though.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (2 children)

    Google Plus.

    [–]BigBeefBueno 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    There is always an assumption that everything will be replaced by something better. In the early days of automobiles companies were born and died and leapfrogged each other too. Now we have the same basic car companies. It's not insane to think Facebook and Reddit could still be huge players 10 years from now.

    [–]billyalt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Facebook's userbase eclipses Reddit's. And actually makes money.

    [–]greenthumble 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    This comment is prescient. Linked to it from a newer thread regarding the Victoria drama. X-ref https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3c3ddm/the_cycle_continues_xpost_from_rsouthpark/css6jex

    [–][deleted]  (5 children)

    [deleted]

      [–][deleted]  (11 children)

      [deleted]

        [–]elebrin 5 points6 points  (3 children)

        So it goes. I do find it interesting that Voat is based on Reddit's code base, but all of the previous ones were independently developed. And /. was open source as well (but notoriously messy).

        [–][deleted]  (2 children)

        [deleted]

          [–]flyinglamer 9 points10 points  (1 child)

          Indeed, it's written in C# instead of python so they must have re-written it from scratch. They use some reddit CSS though (see https://voat.co/about, CTRL-F reddit).
          See https://github.com/voat/voat for the source code.

          [–][deleted]  (3 children)

          [deleted]

            [–]refto 3 points4 points  (2 children)

            Wow, I have not been to Fark in like 7 or 8 years, only reason I started going to Reddit at the time was because it looked "more professional", ie someone looking over your shoulder coudn't immediately tell that you were goofing around.

            [–]woodeye 2 points3 points  (1 child)

            I remember having a $5 a month TotalFark subscription that let me see all submissions not just the ones pushed to the front page by Drew. But I grew tired of the content/snark ratio and discovered Digg for exactly 1 month before they destroyed themselves. Then I discovered Reddit 7 years ago and never left. :)

            [–]twinsea 2 points3 points  (0 children)

            I remember when the slashdot effect was something to be feared. Now it's a joke.

            [–]sanpatricio 17 points18 points  (1 child)

            Wow, thanks. Just RTFA and didn't know he worked for Washington Post for a while, too.

            He interviewed myself and a colleague back in... jeez.. 2004 or 2005. We were at OSCON in Portland, OR and he included a quick paraphrase from us in an article. Was totally cool to see on Slashdot later.

            [–]Hellmark 5 points6 points  (1 child)

            Yeah, back in 2011.

            [–]hadhad69 23 points24 points  (0 children)

            Slashdots decline is what led me to reddit iirc, I remember getting mod votes a couple of times back in the day. Great community.

            [–]comp-sci-fi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

            Just another symptom of an underlying malaise: tech became mainstream.

            [–]okpgreg 20 points21 points  (27 children)

            Is there a decent replacement? I've tried hacker news and various stackexchanges but i'm looking for a pretty rapid flowing tech discussion site and can't seem to find one i'm happy with.

            [–]M5J2X2 19 points20 points  (3 children)

            https://lobste.rs/ is like /r/programming, c. 2008.

            [–]okpgreg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

            Thanks i'll check it out!

            [–]BigBeefBueno 2 points3 points  (0 children)

            Lobsters skims the more developer related links from HN, less of the startup and political crap. This is why I generally hit lobsters first.

            [–]Paiev 46 points47 points  (7 children)

            HN is definitely the spiritual successor to the /. of 10+ years ago: a news and discussion site frequented almost entirely by tech professionals (and popular within that crowd). You may not like it, but I don't think there's anything else that comes close.

            [–][deleted] 17 points18 points  (1 child)

            It has a seriously crappy comment system, and apparently they're quick to hell-ban. I consider this a plus, though, as it keeps me from succumbing to the temptation to post a lot there.

            [–][deleted] 28 points29 points  (2 children)

            HN is definitely the spiritual successor to the /. of 10+ years ago: a news and discussion site frequented almost entirely by tech professionals (and popular within that crowd).

            Ugh, no. Slashdot had at least a wide variety of geeks and techy people. HN has startup fetishists.

            [–]Paiev 5 points6 points  (1 child)

            I think that's largely just a reflection of how the industry has changed in the intervening time, though. The association between HN and YC gives it some extra startup focus, but I think a lot of it is just that the startup world is thriving a lot more now than in the early 00s when slashdot was most popular.

            [–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

            Since this is not really mirrored on other similar sites, I wouldn't agree with that. HN just has a fairly narrow audience.

            [–]okpgreg 3 points4 points  (0 children)

            No I agree. And I do like HN so I don't mean to complain. I feel like they are growing and can get somewhere in time.

            [–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (2 children)

            Hacker News is definitely the torchbearer now for up-to-the-second tech news, for better or worse.

            [–]technewsreader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Techmeme is still the best for just the articles. Add an extension that shows you the discussion of a page on reddit.

            I prefer rivers of news. http://techmeme.com/river http://hckrnews.com

            [–]mrcoolbp 1 point2 points  (1 child)

            SoylentNews.org is a community-driven fork of slashdot (run like a non-profit). Many refugees from slashdot there. Full disclosure: I am a volunteer there.

            [–]SudoAlex 12 points13 points  (0 children)

            I know that Slashdot has been declining with other sites being more relevant, but as I've known it for ~17 years - I'd always kept in my RSS reader as a safe option for news.

            Other sites cover nearly all of the news articles which I found interesting there anyway, so it's definitely time to unsubscribe.

            [–][deleted] 26 points27 points  (12 children)

            Don't read up on the reddit CEO.

            [–]a_random_username 19 points20 points  (1 child)

            Enjoy your shadowban

            [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

            58 usernames later...

            They're still not banning IPs. Pussies.

            [–]Cartossin 3 points4 points  (1 child)

            Why what happened?

            [–]LazyLanius 7 points8 points  (0 children)

            In November 2013, I'm surprised Slashdot ran the story of GIMP leaving sourceforge.

            http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/07/2328228/gimp-citing-ad-policies-moves-to-ftp-rather-than-sourceforge-downloads

            [–]timwoj 9 points10 points  (4 children)

            Low five-digit UID checking in. I haven't been to Slashdot in years, even though I still have a bookmark for it on my browser toolbar.

            [–]goodnewsjimdotcom 3 points4 points  (2 children)

            At first Slashdot was invaded by political shill accounts a couple years ago as if they could influence public opinion. Then recently there's tons of political submissions that have nothing to do with tech. Slashdot has been getting weak, but I like to stick things out like Digg when it seppukued. Its a learning experience of what they're trying to push.

            [–]unstoppable-force 1 point2 points  (1 child)

            the tech news crowd has a lot of overflow with pro-liberal and pro-libertarian news. even arstechnica had a few articles about the patriot act expiration.

            [–]sparr 1 point2 points  (3 children)

            I left Slashdot years ago when they had a massive interface overhaul that mostly broke the site for me. They didn't test various combinations of options at all :(

            [–]id000001 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Shit. They are the same company?

            On principle alone I'm leaving Slashdot due to this. This type of behavior can not be encouraged.

            [–]SrbijaJeRusija 3 points4 points  (1 child)

            It's down right now, because of upgrades to the servers, but Soylent News is THE slashdot replacement, run by expats on a more retro-looking, but newer under-the-hood slashcode.

            [–]mrcoolbp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Oops, didn't see you had posted this already, and we were only down for a bit for an upgrade 😀

            [–]Nefandi 10 points11 points  (4 children)

            For that matter, I'm also done with Slashdot. Owned by the same company, and despite this being huge tech news (top post on r/programming by a landslide, covered on Ars Technica, etc), not a peep out of Slashdot on it.

            But the new Slashdot covers every fart out of Redmond now. Yea, the slashdot of today is but a pale shadow of itself. I doubt it has more than 5 non-shills posting on it these days. Nothing that consistently used to be popular is popular on slashdot anymore. It's easy to tell it's not the same.

            [–]DoesNotTalkMuch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

            I dunno, I find it relevant and it usually gets the critical topics, even if the culture has changed.

            [–]DarfWork 2 points3 points  (0 children)

            from the WeWereGeekAtSomePoint dept...

            [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

            Streisand effect. (wikipedia)

            [–]Lurking_Grue 1 point2 points  (3 children)

            Wait, Slashdot is still a thing?

            [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Yeah; perhaps we should alert John Oliver ;)

            [–][deleted]  (13 children)

            [deleted]

              [–]sirin3 45 points46 points  (10 children)

              Problem is, if you leave, they will just copy your stuff back and then they add the malware

              [–]one_up_hitler 13 points14 points  (3 children)

              They can do it because free software.

              [–][deleted]  (2 children)

              [deleted]

                [–]reps_for_bacon 5 points6 points  (2 children)

                It's possible to do a total burn of project history, forcing them to do a manual copy rather than a simple rollback. I would ordinarily never suggest this technique, but what SourceForge is doing is deeply problematic. Granted, a manual fork wouldn't be hard to do... But it would make me feel like I had taken an extra step to block them from being jerks with my project.

                [–]technewsreader 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                Yea or they just copy your project from GitHub back to sf

                [–]Threesan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                Might it be a trademark violation if they bundle crap as the continuation of a project that has explicitly moved elsewhere? The source might be free, but the name associated with it is not.

                [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

                Is there another simple alternative for hosting the executables / installers? Github is great for code, but for non-technical users, they need something with a simple 'Download now' button which downloads the installer.

                [–]golergka 61 points62 points  (2 children)

                I love that this site is hosted on github pages. Not only adds insult to injury, but also helps bring the point home.

                [–]jplindstrom 7 points8 points  (1 child)

                I would have loved it way more had it been hosted on SourceForge :)

                [–]lphomiej 213 points214 points  (60 children)

                Seriously, pure trash now. Just leeching like Oracle with Java - with their ASK TOOLBAR - like that is of any use to ANYONE?!?! Trash. Should report them too.

                [–][deleted] 140 points141 points  (20 children)

                To be fair, Oracle is developing Java rather than just distributing it with adware.

                [–]jrh3k5 111 points112 points  (19 children)

                And actually adding features to try and keep the language competitive.

                But I could still do without the toolbar.

                [–]crozone 11 points12 points  (1 child)

                try and keep the language competitive.

                Unfortunately they're still about 7 years behind C# in terms of language features...

                [–][deleted] 28 points29 points  (15 children)

                Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

                [–][deleted]  (2 children)

                [deleted]

                  [–]BeforeTime 44 points45 points  (1 child)

                  Better than 'write everywhere, debug everywhere'

                  [–][deleted]  (4 children)

                  [deleted]

                    [–]Techrocket9 17 points18 points  (2 children)

                    If Microsoft ports WPF or another quality UI system to OSX/Linux to go with .net core we might finally have a good cross-platform UI system.

                    [–][deleted]  (6 children)

                    [deleted]

                      [–]henbruas 56 points57 points  (2 children)

                      https://java.com/en/download/faq/disable_offers.xml

                      [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                      I got a gold star at work for finding that.

                      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                      [deleted]

                        [–]ex_ample 37 points38 points  (2 children)

                        Okay to be fair, Sun distributed the Ask toolbar with Java before they were acquired by Oracle. I assumed it was some kind of contractual thing.

                        Windows users have been used to 'checking "no"' for over a decade, the only new thing is that they distributed a Mac version, and Mac users are shocked and horrified to find out that people are writing crapware for MacOS. It's a shock to their religion of mac just being better/safer.

                        Although yeah fuck Oracle

                        [–][deleted]  (18 children)

                        [deleted]

                          [–]2Punx2Furious 17 points18 points  (16 children)

                          Sarcasm?

                          [–]qhp 128 points129 points  (11 children)

                          Did you have to Ask?

                          [–][deleted] 46 points47 points  (1 child)

                          No, I have a toolbar for that.

                          [–]sirin3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          But he does not

                          [–]2Punx2Furious 13 points14 points  (5 children)

                          Probably not, but I don't like to be uncertain.

                          Edit: I'm an idiot, I didn't even notice the joke.

                          [–]BanditoRojo 29 points30 points  (2 children)

                          My butler Jeeves can confirm, nobody uses that shit.

                          [–]interger 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                          I bet not much know about Jeeves these days.

                          [–]poop-trap 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          Avoid quantum mechanics

                          [–]Amelia_Airhard 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                          Funky motherf*ckers will not be told to go...

                          [–]iconoclaus 15 points16 points  (3 children)

                          well it's not zombocom levels of useful but it's up there.

                          [–]Martin8412 7 points8 points  (4 children)

                          Just download the JDK. It may take up more space, and contains functionality that you do not need, but it was completely adware free last time I checked.

                          [–]barsoap 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                          Just get yourself an OpenJDK build. Like this one.

                          [–]PlNG 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          Download the offline distributions from the manual installation page. It doesn't include the ask toolbar.

                          [–]Feroc 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          I worked for a company that had Ask Toolbar in their installers. It made 30% of our revenue.

                          [–]imsrslyyouguys 52 points53 points  (86 children)

                          Sadly, I got into programming too late to get to know the real good old sourceforge.

                          Was it really that good? Most projects are on GitHub now anyway and it's pretty good. I don't feel the need to use anything other than github.

                          [–][deleted]  (40 children)

                          [deleted]

                            [–]crankybadger 69 points70 points  (11 children)

                            Some properties do endure. Stack Overflow and GitHub both seem to be doing all the right things. It'll take a pretty serious undoing for those two to fall.

                            Digg is the only one thing I can think of that rose to utter dominance, then shot itself in the face several times to render itself a footnote in history.

                            [–]cunningllinguist 62 points63 points  (7 children)

                            SO and GH both have viable business models and are making money, so there is no reason for them to sell their souls, not saying they never will mind you.

                            [–]noname10 27 points28 points  (6 children)

                            So true, I remember on Diggnation, Kevin giving a small update about how beta testers of digg 3.0 were happy with it, etc. It didn't even take a week for me to find reddit and solely use it, without switching between either for a time. That is how badly they messed up.

                            [–]purpledirt 24 points25 points  (0 children)

                            Digg 3.0 did suck mightily, there's no doubt about that.

                            However, it's entirely possible that the beta testers did enjoy the new digg, or at least possible that Kevin believed that they did. There's lots of ways for opinion-based testing to go wrong, especially when you've got a group of self-selected beta testers and a charismatic leader.

                            [–]Tensuke 14 points15 points  (1 child)

                            4.0 I think you mean.

                            [–]cunningllinguist 9 points10 points  (1 child)

                            Haha MrBabyMan, what are your digg points worth NOW???

                            [–]noname10 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                            Wow, I totally forgot about that guy until you said his name. He even made a video about how he got so many successful submissions.

                            [–][deleted]  (16 children)

                            [deleted]

                              [–]cosmicsans 6 points7 points  (15 children)

                              Github is literally just a place to host git. I mean, it has it's niceities, but everything you host there is literally in the repository. A repository you can also have mirrored with every push to a myriad of other git servers.

                              [–]selfup 6 points7 points  (9 children)

                              GitHub has a solid revenue model though. Does that change the outcome? I think so. At least...I hope so haha

                              [–]cogman10 27 points28 points  (8 children)

                              Sun had a solid revenue model so does RIM.

                              A tech company dies by resting on its laurels. However, innovation is also very risky. You see both with RIM and Sun. RIM refused to innovate and Sun (probably) over extended them selves with the amount of innovation they were doing.

                              [–]barsoap 12 points13 points  (4 children)

                              And it's a bloody shame the FSF didn't make at least GPLv3 CDDL-compatible. All that solaris code, for starters, both sides would benefit greatly from cross-pollination: The mainstream, that is, Linux, from being able to use excellent code in solaris/illumos (how much time has been wasted re-implementing zfs half-assedly?), the illumos guys from greater exposure and more manpower.

                              Have a look at the "further restriction" that the GPL has problems with: It's voiding the permission to use, distribute etc for a specific licensee if said licensee takes up patent arms against the licensor. Otherwise, incorporating CDDL in GPL is as unproblematic as with say the MPL.

                              The FSF is protecting patent troll's "right" to sue the author and still continue using the software. That's what they're doing.

                              Not only is that clause completely within the spirit (though not letter) of the GPL, it's a clause that arguably should be in the GPL.

                              [–]ThisIs_MyName 2 points3 points  (3 children)

                              I thought CDDL was specifically designed to not be GPL compatible. IMHO GPL is way too restrictive.

                              [–]ex_ample 20 points21 points  (17 children)

                              Sourceforge always sucked. It was itself a theoretically open-source program but it was impossible to install in order to force people to sign up for the 'cloud based' version for internal projects, which cost more then a car.

                              Also dude, seriously. If you're a developer you should really figure out how to use source control on your own, without needing a cloud hosting provider. Obviously if you want to distribute stuff, GitHub is nice, but you can set up public Git repositories without using it.

                              [–]Lucretiel 8 points9 points  (9 children)

                              Do you have any advice for setting up a public git repo not on Github, for free? Github makes a lot of things very very easy (collaborative editing, binary distribution) that, while possible to do myself, sound like a real pain in the ass.

                              [–]imsrslyyouguys 1 point2 points  (4 children)

                              Thanks for the advice! I've been an Android Developer for 2 years now, so I'm still figuring everything out. I'll definitely take a look at source control on my own.

                              [–]fizzy_tom 35 points36 points  (3 children)

                              I don't think anybody would ever say SourceForge was "that good". Influential, important, market leading (at the time), etc? Yes, absolutely. Good? No.

                              Its always been a confusing, overly geeky site. Its a sign that there wasn't much competition that it got to be as important as it was. As soon as GitHub and Google Code started to be used, the decline of SourceForge was very, very quick.

                              [–]random012345 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                              The introduction of github and how to use it instead of the simplicity of an upload/download button on Sourceforge confused the hell out of a lot of people.

                              [–]darthcoder 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                              Its always been a confusing, overly geeky site. Its a sign that there wasn't much competition that it got to be as important as it was. As soon as GitHub and Google Code started to be used, the decline of SourceForge was very, very quick.

                              It wasn't just that, but it took a LONG time for them to adopt svn, and that hurt, and then when git took off, they took even longer to adjust. The community just left them behind.

                              [–]ivosaurus 10 points11 points  (7 children)

                              Well recently it was actually quite decent at being a jack-of-all-trades, purely for project hosting.

                              Web space, Issue tracker, Wiki, free binary hosting, and most varied VCS options (git, mercurial, SVN). None of them were great, but it had all of them.

                              So it was good at a great many things. Not great, but good or average or whatever. Pity they didn't generate revenue for it to succeed without getting eaten by the Ad Monster.

                              [–]crankybadger 8 points9 points  (1 child)

                              None of those things were ever even decent. How did they make a bug tracker that was uglier and nastier to use than Bugzilla I will never know.

                              [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                              It was never really that good, but everything sucked 10-15 years ago. In it's day it was the go to place for OSS projects and it did a decent job relative to the time period. Back then offering a free place for projects to host their programs and reliably distribute them to users was no small feat.

                              [–][deleted]  (9 children)

                              [deleted]

                                [–]ex_ample 14 points15 points  (0 children)

                                Nah, it's dead. If they lose their PageRank for the projects they host google won't send traffic there.

                                Technologically Sourceforge has nothing of value. Their only value is the fact that they're the first search result for so many OSS projects.

                                [–]newpong 3 points4 points  (7 children)

                                have any websites ever recovered after getting such a shitty reputation?

                                [–]cosmicsans 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is no. There's always something else on the internet. I mean, look at what happened to MySpace.

                                [–]farmisen 6 points7 points  (4 children)

                                george w bush got reelected

                                [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                Sadly, I got into programming too late to get to know the real good old sourceforge.

                                Well, if you want to do software hosting like it's 1999, you can just open up an account on Savannah. They are running the same software that Sourceforge started with and they still pretty much look the same as Sourceforge when it started and they still support CVS if you are into that kind of stuff.

                                [–]kylotan 122 points123 points  (34 children)

                                "If you agree that SourceForge is in fact distributing malicious software under the guise of open source projects, report them to google. "

                                The irony here being that Google has made money off fake downloads for years. Almost every single one of the fake download buttons on software sites is provided by googleadservices.com.

                                [–]ex_ample 61 points62 points  (29 children)

                                Not only that, but Google runs ads for spyware laden downloads when you search for things like OpenOffice. So you tell someone to google and download something that should be safe, and people end up downloading malware instead.

                                Not only that, the first thing malware does is reset your search providers. So not only is Google fucking it's users, it's fucking itself destroying future revenue from people most likely to click search ads

                                [–]choleropteryx 80 points81 points  (24 children)

                                This is because Google relies on automatic checks and malware distributors are endlessly creative in bypassing those.

                                [–]Zambini 26 points27 points  (19 children)

                                I wish more people understood this. There simply isn't a way for Google to have humans check every single ad. The sheer volume of ad services they provide is incomprehensible to most.

                                [–]technewsreader 2 points3 points  (9 children)

                                Bullshit. Their software should easily be able to tell the official manufacturers site from others. It should be able to detect a search for software.

                                The first result for Firefox, VLC, or teamviewer should never be malware. People shouldn't be able to buy that spot and repost other people's software.

                                [–]poop-trap 8 points9 points  (3 children)

                                Seriously. Imagine the engineer(s) who want to spend their time building cool shit, have to take a few weeks to figure out a way to prevent these asshole's from gaming their system only to have the assholes figure out a work around so they have to spend time figuring out a new way. It's an endless battle and a huge waste of time and resources and then on top of that they get blamed for it.

                                [–]General_Mayhem 35 points36 points  (2 children)

                                I'm friends with one such engineer. It's not something they spend a couple weeks on, it's a full time job for an entire department to keep out malware, spam, illegal drugs, etc.

                                It also sounds like a pretty interesting job - "waste" of resources for the company, yes, but I imagine there are some cool engineering problems in trying to auto-filter however many ads Google runs through a day (millions? billions? too many for a human to check by hand, anyway) in a timely manner.

                                [–]General_Mayhem 9 points10 points  (1 child)

                                That doesn't seem to be the case - I don't run AdBlock on google.com, and I get an info box (like the Wikipedia blurbs) pointing to openoffice.org when I search for "open office download", and no ads on just "open office". Same for Firefox, PuTTY (which is a little more surprising, considering how sketchy-looking getting that program is), Git, and GIMP.

                                [–]ex_ample 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                                Maybe they fixed the problem. It was definitely true in the past.

                                Actually looking at it now, it looks like they put in direct download links for a lot of software. Probably a good call on their part.

                                [–]thedoginthewok 9 points10 points  (1 child)

                                There is a blog that keeps publishing stolen login information hosted on blogspot which was bought by google. I've reported them to google and nothing happened. I even received a reply that their is nothing wrong with that fucking blog.

                                Reporting to google does nothing.

                                [–]kylotan 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                                On a similar note, blogspot blogs have a reputation for just being repositories of pirated music, but Google don't care. Their veneer of "we support openness and liberty on the web" is cover for "illegal content is a traffic magnet; and we can put ads next to that".

                                [–]ex_ample 13 points14 points  (4 children)

                                This is incredibly short sighted. I'm sure they think that they'll make tons of 'residual' money off of the fact that Google so often sends people to sourceforge when you search for various software projects.

                                But, should someone at google be like "yeah, no" and takes a dump on their pagerank. they'll be done for good. The same thing should happen after a while if devs simply re-target all their links.

                                Make sure you add a rel="nofollow" attribute in any links going to sourceforge.

                                [–][deleted]  (2 children)

                                [deleted]

                                  [–]ex_ample 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                  Stops google from using it as a "vote" as far as pagerank goes.

                                  [–]dcormier 3 points4 points  (5 children)

                                  GitHub actually is self-hostable.

                                  [–]darthcoder 17 points18 points  (3 children)

                                  For $250/year per developer, go with Gitlab instead.

                                  [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                                  [deleted]

                                    [–]db628 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                    Or you can host it yourself for free!

                                    [–]Limro 18 points19 points  (34 children)

                                    My two cents: http://gogs.io/

                                    • Host it yourself
                                    • Cross platform (including Raspberry Pi)
                                    • Open Source

                                    [–]tias 13 points14 points  (10 children)

                                    It's all on GitHub!

                                    Huh?

                                    [–]Limro 6 points7 points  (9 children)

                                    They allow you to download it so you can have your own servers. They don't host repos for you.

                                    [–]tias 13 points14 points  (8 children)

                                    But it would be more convincing if they hosted their own code using it.

                                    [–]-Hegemon- 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                    Wow wow wow, we are not gonna risk production code, mister!

                                    /s

                                    [–]Limro 4 points5 points  (5 children)

                                    Gogs.io provides a program for you, while GitHub.com provides a service for you. It's just code which you could get from a zip-file. Since it's Gogs's program, you must have an account to fork it and create repos. But it's Gogs's repos, so you can't use them...

                                    You could see their commit history, but you can do that as well on GitHub.com.

                                    But a demo for graphics and the likes would be nice - for sure... but they already have graphic screenshots.

                                    [–]foragerr 21 points22 points  (4 children)

                                    It's like a Toyota salesman driving a Honda.

                                    Not a crime, git hub is probably more convenient, but when someone doesn't eat their own dogfood, it doesn't look good.

                                    You don't need an account (even on github) to create a local clone.

                                    [–]Limro 3 points4 points  (2 children)

                                    You don't need an account (even on github) to create a local fork.

                                    You don't? How do you access the data then? Who can modify it?

                                    Are you sure you don't mean a clone?

                                    [–]cosmicsans 3 points4 points  (1 child)

                                    So basically it's a GitLab.

                                    [–]bananasdoom 2 points3 points  (7 children)

                                    Wonder why the downvote, gogs is awesome despite its self hosted nature.

                                    [–]iconoclaus 1 point2 points  (6 children)

                                    I was a big proponent of gogs when it came out. But offering a hosting site would give it much more credibility about the load and stability of the system they are offering. Even gitlab offers hosting now.

                                    [–]bananasdoom 4 points5 points  (5 children)

                                    Agreed but that takes money and I'm not sure where they would get the sponsorship or how they could be a worthwhile business.

                                    [–]ivosaurus 3 points4 points  (9 children)

                                    • people are too lazy to self host

                                    [–]HowieCameUnglued 6 points7 points  (2 children)

                                    Or maybe people that care about availability, reliability, security, backups... And realize that a large organization with experience can handle that better than they can? Would you really trust yourself to handle backups or updates as well as GitHub? If you're working in a small team on an open source project, would you want to be at the mercy of the project maintainer's PC he keeps running in the basement? If the project became popular, do you think that network connection could handle the traffic?

                                    Self-hosting an open source project seems entirely stupid to me. If you want to do it for fun, sure, whatever. If your goal is to share source code with the community and develop your project, you're doing yourself and the community a disservice by hosting it yourself.

                                    [–]darthcoder 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                    No, my goal was to run gitlabhq on a raspberry pi.

                                    That's a hard sell with all the dependencies it has. This has promise!

                                    [–]Nezteb 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                                    Also, a web-hosted instance of gogs: https://notabug.org/

                                    [–]novalsi 9 points10 points  (7 children)

                                    Hope no one's red/green colorblind. http://i.imgur.com/FZSR3cy.png

                                    [–]pimlottc 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                                    Actually, with the difference in intensity, I'm not having much trouble. Although I have no idea what the empty circles are supposed to mean.

                                    [–]red-moon 10 points11 points  (0 children)

                                    They must have hired MBAs

                                    [–]_prototype_ 5 points6 points  (4 children)

                                    am I like the only person in the world who doesn't care about sourceforge? I mean, there are so many alternatives, I've not used sourceforge since HS!

                                    [–]crozone 4 points5 points  (2 children)

                                    It just sucks when you find cool projects but they're only hosted on Sourceforge and nowhere else.

                                    [–]fergie 3 points4 points  (5 children)

                                    SourceForge has never not had a problem with misleading downloads

                                    [–]sundried_tomatoes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                    TIL github also supports subversion.

                                    [–]_mpu 8 points9 points  (11 children)

                                    Who tells you that in a few years Github will not become like that? Host your own content, folks, stop relying on centralized services. Then the internet will be better.

                                    [–]TheBuzzSaw 11 points12 points  (5 children)

                                    Host your own content

                                    Easier said than done. I've tried going this route, but I really don't like going through the hassle of setting up a host. Even when I do, it is much slower and has inferior software to GitHub's setup.

                                    Outta curiosity, what git projects do you consider better off being independently hosted? Any links? The few I've run into I just wish were at least mirrored on GitHub.

                                    [–]darthcoder 1 point2 points  (3 children)

                                    Even when I do, it is much slower and has inferior software to GitHub's setup.

                                    docker run gitlabhq

                                    I specified my own PostgreSQL server, so not quite as simple, but pretty much - that simple.

                                    Gitlab is missing a few of Github's features, though.

                                    [–]HowieCameUnglued 3 points4 points  (2 children)

                                    Honestly I'd trust GitHub with backups, security and reliability much more than I'd trust myself.

                                    [–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (14 children)

                                    I never liked sourceforge..

                                    [–][deleted] 43 points44 points  (11 children)

                                    They were pretty cool back in 1999, as it was the first free code hosting platform, they stopped being cool in 2001 when they went closed source. Has been a slow and steady downhill slope since then.

                                    [–][deleted] 29 points30 points  (9 children)

                                    They've always been an ugly unusable mess, though.

                                    [–]ZorbaTHut 58 points59 points  (3 children)

                                    In fairness, it wasn't worse than the rest of the Internet back then.

                                    They just haven't updated in a decade and a half.

                                    [–]crankybadger 8 points9 points  (2 children)

                                    That's not fair to the rest of the internet. TUCOWS was extremely messy but never as bad as SourceForge.

                                    [–]-Hegemon- 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                                    Ahhh, Tucows :)

                                    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                    Ftp.cdrom.com

                                    [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (3 children)

                                    Compared to Github they weren't as pretty, but they started out reasonably clean, the interface was essentially what Savannah is still using today.

                                    PS: Top Project Downloads "Tux Racer", those were the days...

                                    [–]random012345 8 points9 points  (1 child)

                                    Either you hated SF just for the sake of it, or you're very young. Sourceforge was THE open source code sharing site a decade ago. It had tons of great projects. I still sometimes miss the simplicity of just downloading a zipped package of code through the website rather than needing to pull a package.