Don't want SourceForge email? Delete your account.

brian_d_foy on 2008-09-02T22:54:23

So, I've now stopped using Sourceforge completely, but I'm not deleting anything from there. Since I get the SourceForge emails, I figured I'd now opt out. I never read them anyway.

This message was sent on behalf of SourceForge.net based on
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Yep, their opt-out policy is to delete your account and remove you from all projects. I think I might have unsubscribed in my "Account Options" summary, but with SourceForge you can never tell where the right thing is.

So, what's the rumor around the campfire? Is SourceForge looking to cut down on users?


Reasons for stopping?

polettix on 2008-09-04T00:50:22

I dare to ask... is there any specific reason why you stopped using SourceForge for your projects?

Re:Reasons for stopping?

brian_d_foy on 2008-09-06T05:15:26

These are only my my personal reasons, and people should use whatever tool works for them.

I started using SorgeForge because it was one of the services that offered free, public CVS hosting. They might have been the first, but I don't remember. They also had a file release area, a compile farm, and several other services that mostly duplicated what Perl already had. I found the compile farm very handy when I need to test things on a different operating system. When they also offered SVN, it was very easy to switch.

However, any time I needed to do anything on the SourceForge website, I felt like it was some sort of text adventure game. I couldn't remember where anything was in the multi-layered menus, and even when I took notes things got moved around. The docs are generally good, but only if you can find the right docs. I have the same problem trying to download anything from SourceForge. I wish they could just give a download link and not make me think about packages, mirrors, or any of that other stuff. If I want that, Google Code looks much nicer.

Then, a couple of months ago they turned off the Quick File Release feature, which I had automated with Perl screen-scraping. I was hoping they'd come out with a web service or something, but it never happened. There was something about turning off nightly tarballs too, as I recall, but I'm foggy on those details. I wasn't keen on reworking any of my SourceForge automation tools, and as I was reworking Module::Release, I decided to just not bring the SourceForge stuff up to date. Now that my release tool doesn't support any special SourceForge features, I don't use any special features. I decided that only using their SVN service wasn't enough to keep me there, especially when I don't want to use SVN anymore.

Now, since I'm using Git, commit bits aren't a problem, so I don't need the user management features. The people who were on my projects weren't working on the modules anymore, so I didn't need to keep any accounts open for them.

Subversion might still work for other people, it just doesn't work out for me.