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You know, I'm a little disappointed with the HN commentariat. They at least ostensibly seem to be making a good faith effort to improve the site and people are

You know, I'm a little disappointed with the HN commentariat. They at least ostensibly seem to be making a good faith effort to improve the site and people are responding with out and out venom. Yeah, I'm skeptical too but that's no reason to be so vicious.

loganabbott 11y ago
Thanks for the support.
- interesting_att 11y ago
  Keep this up and you'll be the dev golden child in no time. Best of luck!
  - ohyeshedid 11y ago
    He's not a dev, strictly speaking, he's the new president of SourceForge Media. That actually raises my hopes, as the brass roughing it out in the comments and interacting is a rare thing these days.
- chx 11y ago
  Logan, Sourceforge is still an incredible valuable source of software and information both. Making it a trusted site again would be great. Best of luck.
  - loganabbott 11y ago
    Thanks. I appreciate the kind words. I think we'll have the ship righted sooner than people think.
    - mrweasel 11y ago
      Best of luck to you. It would be nice to see some alternative to Github. As nice as Github is, it's pretty currently pretty much a mono-culture, and that's never a good thing.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      I wish you the best. If I can add my 2 cents: please, can you do something about the UI? It's dated badly and hard to use. Also: I realise you need to generate income from ads, but can you please please remove any ads that use dark patterns like buttons that look like you are going to download the software you came for?
      - loganabbott 11y ago
        The UI will be improved definitely. We just need some time (i.e. more than a couple weeks). It's an old, large beast so it will take a bit of time. And yes the deceptive advertising will be addressed.
        chris_wot 11y ago
        Good on you :-)
- Eridrus 11y ago
  I don't know if you guys will be able to turn it around, but I appreciate the fact that you're going to stop people getting infected with crapware by discontinuing past owners' practices. I wish you the best of luck though because it would be doubly sad if you guys sold it to someone who put all the crapware right back.
  - loganabbott 11y ago
    Thanks. We are not planning on selling. In this for the long haul
    - bencollier49 11y ago
      If you can implement the features which Github has been failing to provide for so long (as per the various polemics which appear on here from time to time), then you could be well in business. Just need to distance yourselves well enough from the previous owners. Good luck!
jeff_tyrrill 11y ago
And, the venom is directed at a target (the new ownership) that had no role in the malware bundling, and in fact is diametrically opposed to it and doing everything it can to dismantle it. A company forthrightly saying that something the company previously did (under different ownership) was unethical, and they are hereby ceasing it immediately, is rare, and refreshing. It should be celebrated.
- loganabbott 11y ago
  :) right here. Everything we will do to going forward will be transparent and dictated by user feedback.
  - pvg 11y ago
    How does SF make money and how does it plan to make money? It seems like it went into a downward spiral of lower traffic and increasingly abusive advertising. Only the latter seems like something you can fix quickly.
    - unimpressive 11y ago
      This is the most important question when it comes to trust. Incentives usually win in the end. Figuring out what that endgame looks like is paramount for anybody evaluating SourceForge as a platform.
      - Ixio 11y ago
        This. This first announcement is a great start to restoring a bit of reputation to SourceForge however I hope some of the next posts will announce the long-term vision of the new owners for the platform. Monetization is what brought SF down, without a definite plan it's hard to know what's going to stop SF from going back down later on.
        loganabbott 11y ago
        Thanks. We will be posting about our long-term plans soon.
dang 11y ago
Yes, it's mean. The top comment is at least exuberant. The rest are vicious in a way that says more about the commenters. But please don't refer to them as "HN". It usually takes a while for things to correct, and the cavalry has since come in, i.e. fairer people with votes, flags, and comments to set things right.
ohyeshedid 11y ago
A lot of people have reasons for being viciously skeptical. Dice did a lot of damage to that neighborhood. SF, Freshmeat, /.; there's been a lot of complaints over the last few years that seemingly fell on deaf ears. Trust is a very hard thing to rebuild, especially straight out of the gate. I'm hopeful, with a healthy dose of skepticism. These are some of the first communities I heavily engaged with, in what feels like a lifetime ago. Part of it comes from not knowing who the new owners are, outside of a nebulous LLC that owns a lot of internet property. What is their actual intent with these properties? Why would they buy SF and not have an immediate roadmap to share? /. is one thing, it's a news aggregation and comment based community. SF, though, that's something completely different. SF isn't a property you just buy and then start crowdsourcing ideas on how to improve/redesign/resurrect. From a skeptical point of view, it could appear as though it was bought because of it's traffic, and now someone has to figure out what to do with it. That's not a promising perspective. They've taken positive steps already, and promise more. That's why I'm hopeful, but it's really easy to start thinking apart an acquisition like this because of the current lack of transparency from the new owner. Ask yourself how you would approach the purchase of a property like SF. I would guess you'd know why you wanted to purchase it, and what you were going to do with it; and I'd wager it'd be more than just removing the bundleware, adding https, and promising to fix the bad ad model. These are great things, and sorely needed, but it doesn't instill a sense of real vision. We're at HN, a place where many of us have made our living hacking things, learning, and outsmarting others, or having vision that nobody else did. Sometimes those awesomely positive things can bring out the inner skeptic. ...and what I mean by vision/roadmap is something like before deciding to buy SF I reached out to Gitlab to foster a mutually beneficial partnership, I have a plan for building up the community ala stackex, I've reached out to several large projects that left SF to inquire about their concerns/issues/complaints and see if I can salvage those relationships, etc. These are things that would be priorities, and actually just part of due diligence, especially before purchase. Instead, we have what we have, and time will tell.
- loganabbott 11y ago
  We have a roadmap. We are reaching out to large projects. We are going to focus on improving the UI and feature sets for developers. We are going to focus on eliminating bundled installers and deceptive advertisements. You are right that those things are almost part of due diligence and we have been working towards these steps. We will share every part of our long-term plans as they become more clear, and we hear back from parties we are collaborating with.

loganabbott 11y ago

Thanks for the support.

interesting_att 11y ago
Keep this up and you'll be the dev golden child in no time. Best of luck!
- ohyeshedid 11y ago
  He's not a dev, strictly speaking, he's the new president of SourceForge Media. That actually raises my hopes, as the brass roughing it out in the comments and interacting is a rare thing these days.
chx 11y ago
Logan, Sourceforge is still an incredible valuable source of software and information both. Making it a trusted site again would be great. Best of luck.
- loganabbott 11y ago
  Thanks. I appreciate the kind words. I think we'll have the ship righted sooner than people think.
  - mrweasel 11y ago
    Best of luck to you. It would be nice to see some alternative to Github. As nice as Github is, it's pretty currently pretty much a mono-culture, and that's never a good thing.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    I wish you the best. If I can add my 2 cents: please, can you do something about the UI? It's dated badly and hard to use. Also: I realise you need to generate income from ads, but can you please please remove any ads that use dark patterns like buttons that look like you are going to download the software you came for?
    - loganabbott 11y ago
      The UI will be improved definitely. We just need some time (i.e. more than a couple weeks). It's an old, large beast so it will take a bit of time. And yes the deceptive advertising will be addressed.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        Good on you :-)
Eridrus 11y ago
I don't know if you guys will be able to turn it around, but I appreciate the fact that you're going to stop people getting infected with crapware by discontinuing past owners' practices. I wish you the best of luck though because it would be doubly sad if you guys sold it to someone who put all the crapware right back.
- loganabbott 11y ago
  Thanks. We are not planning on selling. In this for the long haul
  - bencollier49 11y ago
    If you can implement the features which Github has been failing to provide for so long (as per the various polemics which appear on here from time to time), then you could be well in business. Just need to distance yourselves well enough from the previous owners. Good luck!

jeff_tyrrill 11y ago

And, the venom is directed at a target (the new ownership) that had no role in the malware bundling, and in fact is diametrically opposed to it and doing everything it can to dismantle it. A company forthrightly saying that something the company previously did (under different ownership) was unethical, and they are hereby ceasing it immediately, is rare, and refreshing. It should be celebrated.

loganabbott 11y ago
:) right here. Everything we will do to going forward will be transparent and dictated by user feedback.
- pvg 11y ago
  How does SF make money and how does it plan to make money? It seems like it went into a downward spiral of lower traffic and increasingly abusive advertising. Only the latter seems like something you can fix quickly.
  - unimpressive 11y ago
    This is the most important question when it comes to trust. Incentives usually win in the end. Figuring out what that endgame looks like is paramount for anybody evaluating SourceForge as a platform.
    - Ixio 11y ago
      This. This first announcement is a great start to restoring a bit of reputation to SourceForge however I hope some of the next posts will announce the long-term vision of the new owners for the platform. Monetization is what brought SF down, without a definite plan it's hard to know what's going to stop SF from going back down later on.
      - loganabbott 11y ago
        Thanks. We will be posting about our long-term plans soon.

dang 11y ago

Yes, it's mean. The top comment is at least exuberant. The rest are vicious in a way that says more about the commenters. But please don't refer to them as "HN". It usually takes a while for things to correct, and the cavalry has since come in, i.e. fairer people with votes, flags, and comments to set things right.

ohyeshedid 11y ago

A lot of people have reasons for being viciously skeptical. Dice did a lot of damage to that neighborhood. SF, Freshmeat, /.; there's been a lot of complaints over the last few years that seemingly fell on deaf ears. Trust is a very hard thing to rebuild, especially straight out of the gate. I'm hopeful, with a healthy dose of skepticism. These are some of the first communities I heavily engaged with, in what feels like a lifetime ago. Part of it comes from not knowing who the new owners are, outside of a nebulous LLC that owns a lot of internet property. What is their actual intent with these properties? Why would they buy SF and not have an immediate roadmap to share? /. is one thing, it's a news aggregation and comment based community. SF, though, that's something completely different. SF isn't a property you just buy and then start crowdsourcing ideas on how to improve/redesign/resurrect. From a skeptical point of view, it could appear as though it was bought because of it's traffic, and now someone has to figure out what to do with it. That's not a promising perspective. They've taken positive steps already, and promise more. That's why I'm hopeful, but it's really easy to start thinking apart an acquisition like this because of the current lack of transparency from the new owner. Ask yourself how you would approach the purchase of a property like SF. I would guess you'd know why you wanted to purchase it, and what you were going to do with it; and I'd wager it'd be more than just removing the bundleware, adding https, and promising to fix the bad ad model. These are great things, and sorely needed, but it doesn't instill a sense of real vision. We're at HN, a place where many of us have made our living hacking things, learning, and outsmarting others, or having vision that nobody else did. Sometimes those awesomely positive things can bring out the inner skeptic. ...and what I mean by vision/roadmap is something like before deciding to buy SF I reached out to Gitlab to foster a mutually beneficial partnership, I have a plan for building up the community ala stackex, I've reached out to several large projects that left SF to inquire about their concerns/issues/complaints and see if I can salvage those relationships, etc. These are things that would be priorities, and actually just part of due diligence, especially before purchase. Instead, we have what we have, and time will tell.

loganabbott 11y ago
We have a roadmap. We are reaching out to large projects. We are going to focus on improving the UI and feature sets for developers. We are going to focus on eliminating bundled installers and deceptive advertisements. You are right that those things are almost part of due diligence and we have been working towards these steps. We will share every part of our long-term plans as they become more clear, and we hear back from parties we are collaborating with.