SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring

vivaoporto writes: In a reversal motivated by community concerns (like the high profile outcry over the distribution of an ads-enabled installer for GIMP and the accusation by Fyodor of the hijacking of the nmap SourceForge project), SourceForge has discontinued third-party bundling of mirrored content.

Along with that, as of June 18th, SourceForge started "removing SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects" and engaging their "newly-formed Community Panel to discuss site features and program policies including a redesigned mirror program." Of the 295 mirrored projects, they removed all that were "not co-maintained with one or more of the original developers, except where the upstream site has been discontinued." For those wanting to reach SourceForge for some constructive feedback, they point to the recently-established Community Voice forum. Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.

Comments

Re:Meh

[Megane]

That's what the PHBs who order these kind of changes (often so they can look like they're doing something) never think about. When you've done something to break the trust of a community, no matter how on the decline said community may be, it's very hard to repair the damage to your reputation afterward. Slashdot Beta would have been a worse mistake if they hadn't had the "&nobeta=1" escape clause, but fortunately that meant they only went half way before the community pushed back. (And I still think the "text over images" design meme is stupid. Just look at this abomination of web design.)

How many of you out there are still avoiding the use of FTDI's USB serial chips? And how many of you instantly wrote them off and gave them the "unperson" treatment?

Re:Kickstarter campaign to fix the overlord proble

[Pseudonymous Powers]

I have often wondered about this myself. Is Slashdot worth more to its users that it is to its corporate masters? Is there some sum of money that unsatisfied Slashdot users could scrape together, perhaps over weeks and months, contributing some petty sum to some online swear jar whenever they encounter a petty annoyance, that would eventually accumulate into something that Dice would have to take seriously?

The thing is, from a revenue perspective, I'm not sure Slashdot is worth anything at all. There's no "there" there--its value is almost entirely in its network of engaged commenters. I'm pretty sure 9x% of the people who visit Slashdot use ad blockers, and even if you somehow found a way to sneak ads past the blockers, that would just cause those people to exodus anyway. So I guess ideally Slashdot would have to be run as sort of a public service, rather than as a money-maker. I figured Dice bought Slashdot and SourceForge to drive traffic to their job site, sort of as a loss-leader, goodwill gesture, look-at-us-we-totally-get-you-guys, please-consider-us-for-your-next-job-search sort of thing. But given how they're seemingly burning the goodwill candle at both ends by pushing through unpopular measure after unpopular measure, I have to admit I can't figure out what their real strategy is.

Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?

Then again again, if it's just a forum, why hasn't everybody moved on, en masse, to one of the clones of Slashdot that disgruntled Slashdotters have started in recent years? Because it's all about the network, I guess, and two halves of a big network aren't even half as good as the original network.

Beats me. I hope somebody figures something out before too long, though.