Today we’re starting to roll out a whole new look for SourceForge.
As a quick refresher, SourceForge was acquired in 2016, and the very first thing we did after acquiring SourceForge two years ago was remove bundled installers from projects, a move universally applauded in the developer community. The new SourceForge team has been hard at work rolling out improvements which have included:
- Implemented malware scans for every single project on SourceForge
- Removed ads for developers (if you’re logged in, you’ll never see ads)
- Added HTTPS support for project website hosting and all downloads
- Added multi-factor authentication
- Created an ad reporting tool and team to eliminate bad and/or deceptive ads
Now, we’re rolling out the redesigned SourceForge to all users. This UX and new logo is just the first step. We will be releasing further improvements and new SourceForge features throughout the year.
SourceForge hosts over 430,000 projects and has 3.7 million registered developers. Every day, SourceForge sees over a million visitors and serves 4.5 million software downloads.
One of SourceForge’s main strengths has always been our ability to empower open source software developers to reach a huge amount of potential users through our powerful discovery and distribution capabilities. We also provide detailed statistics and mailing lists to project admins. The new SourceForge significantly improves on not only the design, but the detail and granularity of the statistics we provide project admins with. The SourceForge Directory is also much easier to use, with all project categorization types now available as filters on the left side of the Directory pages. 2018 will see us further improve on these capabilities.
We’ve also created a GitHub Importer tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge and sync your GitHub project file releases on SourceForge so you can take advantage of the strengths of both platforms. We believe the open source community is always better served when there are multiple options for open source projects to live, and these options are not mutually exclusive.
You can keep up with new developments on the SourceForge blog, newsletter, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
The team at SourceForge is immensely passionate about open source software, and that has informed the new design as much as possible. The new look rolling out this week was a large project that took a lot of effort from a dedicated team, and will always be continually improved upon. We hope you enjoy it.
I would love to:
1- have the option to one click set the download server and dont automatically select one every time .
2- If Download Manjaro:
Manjaro or other GNU/Linux Distros, should have a folder with all desktop enviroments on that folder and
when you want to download you just click and open the download dialog. so you can download all files FROM the FOLDER WITHOUT
leaving the Folder URL.
3- ask the developers to move to SHA512SUM and provide the Sig in all files.
The https for *.sourceforge.net doesn’t seem to be working.
PS: more comments here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108750
Your red on orange social media icons are really hard to see. Other than that, it looks great.
And thank you for all the work the team has put in. I left SourceForge years ago but these positive changes are going to win a lot of users like myself back.
This is actually amazing, great improvement, thanks!
First reaction: urrgh! I suppose this is to make it look good on tablets, but it’s as ugly as sin on a desktop browser.
+1
Several years ago, a SourceForge “mind” project was hijacked away from me. What happened was, I had a similar project but with a different name on Google code. I received an e-mail from Google Code letting me know that a certain team wanted to open a “mind” project on Google Code, and did I have any objections? No, I did not, as I answered the -email. But then somehow the same team was able to hijack my SourceForge “mind” project away from me. I would like to get the “mind” project back, but SourceForge also changed the way in which developers were uploading their work to SourceForge. Now I am using an Acer netbook on which I do not have file transfer protocol (ftp), so I wish that I could get my “mind” project back and that I could use a simple Web interface to upload my open-source AI software in Perl, Forth and JavaScript.
Dude, what is ‘mind’ project?
> Now I am using an Acer netbook on which I do not have file transfer protocol (ftp)
All major browsers support ftp, I believe.
You’re doing a real good job to regain the lost prestige. Keep up the good job!
Is the new look hard on the eyes, or is it just me.
No only you. I mean, I get why the new design, but coloration is not to my taste. Or is it just both of us?
Where is the “old” mirror selection?
May because i’m not ehm…young enough using javascript for downloading?
At 2nd try it was working better, sorry.
A re-betterment:
Like the “old” one. The “direct link” on */download?
Not on “select a mirror”. Keep it simple.
I was surprised to see first. Great now more modern look with a more responsive appearance. congratulations
I think the design need to be tweaked more. It’s just look basic for some web-based service lime sourceforge.
For the first time in a long while, I would say that the new SourceForge UI design is a significant improvement. The pages uses to be very cumbersome, sending over 1MB of data for each refresh, but now they are loading quickly and look crisp.
The new Design was unexpected for me, but I can get used to it.
I think it’s very nice, but the text is a bit too large (desktop version).
I also noticed that the number of downloads on the left does not change if you choose a different time period. Only when you change the page (e. g. country list) does it update.
To be clear I am applauding the previous poster’s use of le mot juste.
+1
The date “01.09.18” of the blog entry is invalid. This would be 01 SEP 2018, which is 230 days in the future.
Please change the format to YYYY-MM-DD, as 2018-01-09 reads clear and unambiguous all over the world.
It may come as a surprise to those who live in the US that most of the world does not use their funny date format. In fact the US Standard is ISO8601 – it just isn’t used by most of the population.
YYYY-MM-DD (or even YYYYMMDD, as that is also fine for me), this MM.DD.YY business drives me nuts.
Also it would great to drop this AM/PM thing
7:30 am ==> 0730
7:30 pm ==> 1930
24hr notation is easier to read, and requires fewer characters to display
The top 20% of my screen realestate is now wasted with an persistent orange band and white box whilst the text I want to so scrolls beneath it.
and the Right 30% is now fixed showing project of the month and social media rubbish.
How do I turn that all off and regain the use of my full screen?
It is like working on an old 11″ monitor but with a 6″ border top and right.
Most distracting and annoying.
This site should encourage development not hinder it, there was nothing wrong with the old interface.
Cheers
Chris
Second comment.
When I am logged in why do I have to provide name and email again in order to comment and why can I not edit the comment that I have posted?
This was not at all thought out as a forum for developers by developers it looks more like change for the sake of change and badly implemented at that.
The new website look seems to have done very little for the website except to superficially change style of individual elements, to something tabletty. Basically the same reason Windows 8/10 looks hideous while somehow claiming to be an improvement.
But that’s not so bad, considering that seemingly everyone these days is doing the same, often while claiming that those changes are somehow some major feature.
It’s just disappointing, since if you were going to work on the website I would have liked to see some fixes for major usability. Like the way the git code browser is unusable, and oh, the mailing list archive interface is unusable, and both for the same reason — the historical email/commit picker is embedded on the same page as the actual content, while squeezed in between headers and footers and the empty bars of nothing to either side, and it is extremely uncomfortable to actually attempt to look at changesets or emails without giving up and cloning the repository in its entirety to view with a better tool (like git log, which defeats the purpose of having a web interface entirely).
Far too much space is eaten up when looking at those developer-centric tools, by website headers and footers, and this new huge white box that seems to be an advertisement which consumes a quarter of the screen with absolute positioning which floats down *with* you as you scroll down the page… right underneath the global navigation toolbar for the speed test and your blog articles which no one trying to look at the mailing lists of a specific project will care about. More space is taken up having to view the mailing list year picker *and* the month picker on the same page as the expanded emails for that month, with no way to granularly look at emails. It is extremely hard to tell which emails are a reply to which others…
Maybe sourceforge should consider replacing both, by cgit and mailman respectively. Both are clean, minimalistic products that are *extremely* good at their job.
Love sourceforge. You guys have always been end-user friendly. I love being able to filter by Operating System, license, etc… I don’t know of another resource (outside of app stores, though your filtering is superior) that makes software discovery so painless. Big win for both developer and end-user.
To go with my previous comment about software discovery, I have already added your RSS feed for blogs. Also, I seem to recall that I was able to get RSS feeds for specific categories of new software many moons ago. So each time new software was added to a subCategory, I was updated, I’ll look around to see if this is still implemented.
I don’t believe updated software was part of the feeds – just new stuff – but I could be wrong. In any case, I recall that I had lots of daily listings but wasn’t overwhelmed.
First, I am going to assume some changes were made since some of the above comments (or maybe those comments were mobile users; hard to fix when they don’t say). My top bar is displaying as maybe 5% of the page. On this page, I do have around 20% of the right side empty or containing ads. On a wide screen (which I am using), that is acceptable, but on a 4:3 ratio screen, not so much. It seems this would force mobile users to view the site in wide view orientation, which makes sites like this really hard to use.
Second, that reddish orange and dark gray/black presents a contrast problem that makes some parts of the site mildly painful to look at. It is not as bad as red and blue, but it’s still bad. Also, I feel like orange has been overdone on modern web sites. The HTML 5 logo uses practically the same color scheme, and it seems like every web site and its dog has decided to adopt it. I do like the new layout. It seems more professional than the previous one. The color scheme does seem a bit cliche though, and it honestly is not that great. (The HTML 5 logo at least separates the orange from the black, avoiding the contrast issues.)
Third, I like the speed test, but I am not sure why you wasted your resources on it. I though Sourceforge was about providing a space for open source project distribution. It feels like some dev said, “Hey, we should do a speed test!”, and them some manager approved it because it sounded cool, without bothering to consider whether or not it would further the goals of the company or even be profitable. And besides, Ookla’s speed test works perfectly fine, and yours does not add anything of value that theirs does not have. You could have just put a link to the Ookla speed test on your site, and it would have accomplished the same things for way cheaper. (And maybe you could have even gotten Ookla to pay something advertising.)
Overall good work, but there are some clear oversights here. Currently your site feels like a combination of an expensive dev learning site for topics that can be learned faster with free tutorials, a site for an experimental project that is looking for investors, and a pay version of StackOverflow (probably because I have seen this color scheme and front page layout on many of these kind of sites). Honestly, I don’t like the new front page much. If I wanted all of that text, I would look for an “About” link in the nav. I would prefer a front page that provides easy navigation to where I want to go, and nothing else.
What ads are you talking about, LOL. xD Firefox, with the uBlock Origin Add-on, together with the gHacks “user.js” which is now hosted on GitHub (file to control the about:config preferences), they can insure that there will be absolutely no advertisements, pop-ups, tracking cookies of any kind present on your system.
You know, the hardware which we’ve paid for and the Internet connection for which we’re giving money to the ISP. It’s (still!) possible to have a fully functional system (and web), without sacrificing much privacy… Thanks to Mozilla. Hopefully they will not decide against this (winning) philosophy any time soon… Unlike Opera and Google Chrome (and most others), which have all lost their minds.
Could you add OS/2, eComStation and ArcaOS in the list of operating systems. We use just zip files for downloading programs and alike. Thank you.
The new site is OK.
I’m on my way to content and after my my first ‘Gasp!’ I’ve recovered.
The hover colours are nice. I like the way the links/buttons brighten up. It helps me, having poor eyesight.
This means the colours for the green link:
‘Download Latest Version’
are the wrong way round.
Cheers.
I don’t like the orange color, but I enjoy the good service that SourceForge has always given me when I need the best of the FOSS.
For years I have been a privileged user of SourceForge – although I stopped being so during the black period of the bundled adware -, and I sincerely hope that these projects of renovation and innovation give prosperity and joy to their promoters.
It’s, actually, fine (!) if this (redesign) will mean that there will be no re-packaging of software – like what used to be going on here ~2015. Haven’t been visiting SourceForge ever since (moved on, like everyone else, to GitHub and the like); but, this can mean a promising revival, idk. 🙂
*although the design (& color) isn’t *that* great, well – at least, at the moment; but, it’s great to see things happening!
I really like the new interface.