Help Source Forge Succeed

I'd be interested in a discussion of how to HelpSourceForgeSucceed. CopyLeft extremists need not join in, since they believe any lucre derived from proprietary software development is tainted, so the SourceForge servers are out of bounds.

What would be a measurement of the "success" of SourceForge, and what sorts of improvement do you think are needed? It seems to me that SF is already pretty successful at fulfilling its mission - providing webspace for people to maintain free/open-source projects without paying for it - and I don't think there is much danger of it disappearing any time soon. As HelpSourceForgeSuck indicates, there are many examples of poorly maintained projects, but I don't think that is really a serious problem. -- KrisJohnson

As of summer 2003, SourceForge is sucking more and more. Project search was down or flaky for months earlier this year; now anonymous CVS is acting up as a result of the (correct) decision to allocate more bandwidth and CPU resources to developer CVS than to anonymous. In a nutshell, they're running old code on systems that can't keep up with the load. A number of the larger, more populous projects are considering moving their hosting.

One word: Synergy. Now how do you make a metric for that?

My guess would be something to the effect of syners? You know, kilosyners, centisyners for those who like to only give 10%. -- MichaelKing

The opposite of HelpSourceForgeSuck should be something more like HelpSourceForgeRock?.

No, the opposite of HelpSourceForgeSuck should be something more like HelpSourceForgeBlow?.

Or if you're from Apple: HelpSourceForgeLikeSuckLess?.

What about HelpSourceForgeFailToSuck?

It does rank them by downloads and other criteria, thus the lame ones are mostly at the end. It's kind of like a Google search, the higher the search-results page number, the less relevant or useful the results. Thus, I see little reason to complain: simply give up after page 4. Yes, it would be nice if people weren't flaky, but we don't live in an perfect world. They have their own version of WikiPuppys.