Open-Source Development Site Reaches Usage Milestones (TechWeb)

Posted Nov 3, 2002 6:35 UTC (Sun) by socket (guest, #43) [Link]

Not only is it a lot of eggs in one basket, but I've just spent the last half hour trying to figure out how to remove two projects I started and never went anywhere with. I'm the only maintainer, I've barely touched any of the facilities they provide (including CVS), so it's clearly a waste of resources for them to continue hosting it.

Funny how every single page has the link in the upper left: Register New Project.

In case anyone is ever in a similar situation, the thing you need to do is submit a bug against Sourceforge in the "Project Administration" category, with the Summary line being "Project Removal Request: projectname" Here's a link so you can do that more directly.

If you browse the list of bugs filed in the "Project Administration" category, it becomes quite apparent that most of them are for having projects removed. One would expect that such a frequent request would be mentioned in a FAQ somewhere, but it took quite some time to figure out how to go about doing this.

Discussing this on IRC (lug.boulder.co.us, #colug) Kevin Fenzi commented that it would be a problem for GPL'd projects to simply disappear - it would be a shame for the source code for a genuinely useful project to suddenly disappear if the only developer decides to leave the project. It would be better to have a "graveyard" section in Sourceforge.

A valid point, I agree. So why doesn't Sourceforge make a "graveyard" area and make it easier for dead projects to go there? My cynical side thinks it's because they want to claim hosting 50,000 projects, even if half of them are thoroughly dead.

Following the "More Statistics" link on their front page will let you see the "Most Active This Week," "Most Active of All Time," "Top Downloads," "Top Downloads (Past 7 Days)," "Top Project Pageviews," and "Top Forum Post Counts."

These aren't statistics, these are bragging numbers. Statistics would be means and standard deviations. Perhaps mean time between releases, such things as that. I suspect the real statistics would be too embarrassing for Sourceforge to admit, given all the dead projects.

Genuinely stale eggs should get tossed.