[aphextron]

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What exactly is "new" besides the brutally awful design and color scheming? I see the same malware laden downloads that can be found anywhere else on the internet, surrounded by ads as was there before. Over 600 separate HTTP requests and counting on a project page? Really? You seriously expect developers to use this?

[Twirrim]

For what it's worth, they've been bought out since the malware thing happened, and one of the first things they did was cut that shit out.

But holy crap this is terrible. 101 requests while using an adblocker, 116 without. Of those requests I count 62 of them being to download Javascript. More than half?!

Out of curiosity, retried using pingdom's tools: https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/z7f8e/https://sourceforge.net/p...

It gets a solid D, unsurprisingly. They saw over 200 requests, 43% were javascript calls, and javascript made up more than 52% of the final page content loaded. That's just nuts, considering what the site actually is.

I don't like to pick on websites and developers that much, but holy crap what were they thinking? Did they even consider what the experience is like outside of their dev laptop or using a fast network?

[zmix]

I am logged in.

I got 7 ad-warnings on "uBlock Origin" and the page is lean.

[Twirrim]

Open up the network debugger (Tools -> Web Developer -> Network in Firefox, View->Developer->Developer Tools -> Network in Chrome), do a forced reload and see what you get.

Even logged in I still get a ridiculous number of things loaded. The biggest culprits look to be the foundation javascript stuff (I'm assuming that's a javascript framework) being loaded from fsdn.com. Every request made, hurts, unless you're lucky to be using HTTP/2.0 (they don't support 2.0), and even then you've got to think about interpreter starting/loading/parsing/executing time. For every script.

They're also passing parameters in the javascript urls (e.g. handlebars.js?1515608140) which really meddles with caching etc.

The latency situation gets even worse if you're anywhere but on a fast connection (so lots of end users in their global target market).

I like the overall look of the new site, but it's a performance nightmare.

[contras1970]

the design is a full-frontal reenactment of the cca-2000 web design canon; the newer-looking elements bring memories of early stackoverflow... somehow as if freshmeat back then had a trip. i woudn't write this off right away. let's wait and see.

[dv_dt]

That orange is very similar to the HN orange. The ad placements do give it a smarmy feeling as a site.

[dbg31415]

Yeah, I halfway expected Wappalyzer to say, "Built with PHP-Nuke."

But maybe they stopped injecting ads into open-source downloads at least? Can't imagine why anyone would trust them again.

[loganabbott]

Yeah we ended that practice as soon as we acquired SourceForge over a year ago, and we have nothing to do with the company that made those decisions in the first place. It's in the blog post. As for ads/design- we know we can't please everyone and still keep the lights on. If you login you won't see any ads.

[signal11]

I wish you every success and am not going to hold pre-acquisition decisions against you. The last thing FL/OSS code hosting needs is a monoculture.

However, if you could publicize -- anywhere -- how you plan to monetize, that would be very useful in building back user trust (just my 2c).

Also, re design - it would be very useful to have something comparable to Github/Bitbucket (and Gitlab I guess), all of which are in a similar space. Perhaps one for the roadmap?

Thanks again!

[loganabbott]

Right now we monetize via display ads, but any logged in user or project admin will not see any ads. We are looking at ways to cut down on the amount of display ads going forward, and have already begun doing that as we get more direct partnerships.

[mindcrime]

Is a GitHub-like paid account feature in the cards? FWIW, I happily pay GitHub every month, for two separate accounts (one for purely "personal" projects, and one for projects from my startup). I can't help but think there are people / projects that would be happy to pay SourceForge the service you provide.

[greenhouse_gas]

Just curious, considering that you seem to work there:

What does sf.net have to offer that github (or gitlab which is the "open source not-github github", or bitbucket) doesn't?

[dbg31415]

Had no idea it was bought.

Look, I think the brand has a lot of baggage with the tech community. You just can't put ads in downloads and expect it to all blow over.

I don't know how you go about re-building trust after something like that.

Bug: The floating bar on the right side, "Recent Posts" etc. I can never see the last box. When I get to the bottom of the page it's still covered.

[loganabbott]

Thanks for the bug report I'll take a look. My company didn't put ads in the downloads, and we when we took over we stopped that practice. I think most people can discern the difference, but if not it's okay. We're just focused on doing right by the million daily users and 430,000 projects hosted here.

[anowlcalledjosh]

Question: how many of those 430 thousand projects have seen an update in the last year?

[ketralnis]

> But maybe they stopped injecting ads into open-source downloads at least?

3rd line of the article and first of the "what's new" bullet points:

> Removed bundled adware from projects

[tytytytytytytyt]

The download page looks like it has fewer malware/ad links.