SourceForge: the "Hotel California" of open source projects?

Posted Jun 14, 2007 19:55 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: SourceForge: the "Hotel California" of open source projects? by zooko
Parent article: SourceForge: the "Hotel California" of open source projects?

That page looks like just what Dave is complaining about: the two lines that say "this is not the page you're looking for" are drowned out by all the other stuff on the page. Some people read a page from top to bottom, but many approach a page quite differently and would in fact miss those lines.

A redirect page would look like a redirect page, not a normal SF project page with two lines in the middle saying not to use it. However, to solve the Google problem, SF would also have to obliterate the old project page while somehow still giving seekers of the old project access to it. That's probably hard.

SourceForge: the "Hotel California" of open source projects?

Posted Jun 14, 2007 21:04 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802) [Link] (2 responses)

Couldn't robots.txt be used to distinguish between Google and ordinary people?

In the Alternative...

Posted Jun 14, 2007 22:26 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

Good point. Alternately, SourceForge could change the URL for the old code, making it findable but giving the new project page a chance to pull ahead in search rankings (or not).

SourceForge: the "Hotel California" of open source projects?

Posted Jun 16, 2007 2:29 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Well, that isn't really how robots.txt is supposed to be used. Archived project pages are exactly the kind of thing Google's spider is interested in.

I think Dave's issue is really with Google (or search technology in general), not with Sourceforge.

SourceForge: the "Hotel California" of open source projects?

Posted Jun 15, 2007 9:00 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

The page has ads, true, but the first thing I did see was the mention that the page has moved. Second, I noticed the ads. It's not that terrible, imho. It's really not like you have to search for the link to the new page or something.

I do however have problems with the fact ALL ppl searching for this project on google will end up on the sourceforge site. That's just not right, they should end up on the right page. If Sourceforge doesn't want to remove the page, they should redirect immediately, or at least automatically after 5 seconds.