5 ms·

History of SourceForge according to me: - forced users to look at ads and go through two steps in order to download projects - when that was not enough, injec

History of SourceForge according to me: - forced users to look at ads and go through two steps in order to download projects - when that was not enough, injected malware into the files users were downloading - irrecoverably lost project information I don’t think they can do anything to salvage their image at this point. The last incident didn’t even inflict too much damage because there wasn’t much left to SourceForge.

rhizome 8y ago
Sometimes when things get broken, they're broken forever.
lokedhs 8y ago
Many years ago me and a friend wrote an open source game and we hosted the project on Sourceforge. This was some time in the late 90's. The project got dropped as so many others do because both of us found more interesting things to do. Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? Not so with Sourceforge. I found that the entire project was deleted. I contacted them and got the answer that it was indeed deleted because it hadn't been touched in however many years it had been. To give credit where credit is due, they were actually able to recover my code from a backup and restore the project. The point of this post was just to point out that they've done some user hostile things for a very long time.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? That's unfair. Back then, storage was expensive, backups were expensive, bandwidth was expensive, server CPU time was expensive. You can't fault them for removing unsupported projects in an era when Microsoft and Yahoo were only giving you 10MB of email storage (you might get an extra 15MB for $10/mo) and similarly aggressive purge policies.
  - lokedhs 8y ago
    That's a fair argument, but couldn't they at least have sent an email about it?
    - macspoofing 8y ago
      I don't disagree with that. That would have been the right approach.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Nit: Given that Sourceforge launched in November, 1999, that would have been the very late 1990s. More likely early 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge
  - lokedhs 8y ago
    You're right. We started our project in the late 90's but it was only later we moved it to Sourceforge.

rhizome 8y ago

Sometimes when things get broken, they're broken forever.

lokedhs 8y ago

Many years ago me and a friend wrote an open source game and we hosted the project on Sourceforge. This was some time in the late 90's. The project got dropped as so many others do because both of us found more interesting things to do. Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? Not so with Sourceforge. I found that the entire project was deleted. I contacted them and got the answer that it was indeed deleted because it hadn't been touched in however many years it had been. To give credit where credit is due, they were actually able to recover my code from a backup and restore the project. The point of this post was just to point out that they've done some user hostile things for a very long time.

macspoofing 8y ago
>Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? That's unfair. Back then, storage was expensive, backups were expensive, bandwidth was expensive, server CPU time was expensive. You can't fault them for removing unsupported projects in an era when Microsoft and Yahoo were only giving you 10MB of email storage (you might get an extra 15MB for $10/mo) and similarly aggressive purge policies.
- lokedhs 8y ago
  That's a fair argument, but couldn't they at least have sent an email about it?
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    I don't disagree with that. That would have been the right approach.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Nit: Given that Sourceforge launched in November, 1999, that would have been the very late 1990s. More likely early 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge
- lokedhs 8y ago
  You're right. We started our project in the late 90's but it was only later we moved it to Sourceforge.