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by loganabbott 3086 days ago
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.
3 comments

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!

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.
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.
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?

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.

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