Ad Terras Per Aspera

Kris Chapman over at the SF.Net Engineering Blog is asking what the community thinks works and doesn’t work. This is what I think.

What doesn’t work:

• The lack of a clean CSS layout means it is hard for users to use the website in diverse environments. Many users who have special needs (such as using audio readers who depend on clean website layout), or simply users who want to access the website from a low resolution device (640×480 screens, cell phones, PSP, etc) cannot deal with the lack of a clean layout.
• The lack of good XHTML. The current SF.Net tag soup is the equivalent of a 14 year old script kiddy hopping on an AOL chatroom, and saying, “Y0 m4ng!1, w4ts upz0r!!!lolone!!eleven!” Welcome to the year 2005, where people use validating XHTML, and quit making poor Firefox use quirks mode.
• God forsaken <iframe> ads. I don’t really minds ads, people have to pay for their website somehow, but please! Drop those iframes! If you really need to support HTML layouts for ads, do something cool like dynamically insert the HTML using AJAX.
• The really backwards setup of SF.Net tracker. As much as people hate Bugzilla, and bitch about it’s usability bugs, its still lightyears ahead of the tracker. The tracker needs to match Bugzilla feature for feature, and I wouldn’t be against the cloning of the Bugzilla interface.
• Doodad Box bloat in the layout. I agree that Most Active and Top Downloads are useful, but they do not belong on most pages. IMHO, they belong two places, the front page, and My SF; nowhere else, its a waste of space.
• Lack of bandwidth/server power. Its not related to the design itself (actually, it is, if the layout would use half the images, I’d use half the bandwidth, because no client is properly caching the images anyhow), but the site is also slow because too many users are hitting the servers.
• Lack of forum/mailing list/whatever else integration. Too many projects have a huge disconnect between the ‘web user’ and the ‘clueful user’ groups. Web users typically use forums, the actual users we care about use mailing lists and/or news groups. For projects that have both enabled (which most do), the two groups have a hard time communicating with each other. What we really need is to get rid of forums, mailing lists, and the previously existing news groups, and fold them all into a single system. Someone can post from an email client, a news client, or a web client, and it all goes to the same place and talks to the same users.
• Get rid of comments on news items for both SF.Net news items and project news items. This is another case of communication method overload. Whatever users want to say using the comment system, it needs to be said somewhere else, commenting on the news entries is not the way. No one is using them anyhow.
• Get rid of project news items altogether. You know what? Quite a few projects aren’t even using them, or are using them improperly, or just aren’t keeping them up to date. The only place a project has to report news is their website space given to them by SF.Net.
• Project’s DB sucks. Yes, another thing not related to the SF.Net website itself, but it still reflects on the user experience. I don’t personally use the server myself, but I’ve been told its often slow, crash happy, unresponsive, and way overloaded. This should be the next thing to get loving from Santa. (CVS has been a naughty child, and it got two or three new overpowered boxen, how sad.)
• The download system.

What does work:

• Anything I haven’t bitched about. If I don’t bitch about it, I probably haven’t even noticed it. The more transparent a service is, the better designed it is. The perfect sf.net setup would involve a system that could accommodate any user’s work flow. And I really mean any, not most, and not half. Any.
• The new stats system. It works quite well, its a little glitchy, but its a clear step up from what we had before.
• The donation system. This is another useful service. Its always been hard to properly recognize our generous friends in the audience, mainly because we could not automate the system, but now we can. However, a lot of projects are not using the system, and giving users their Paypal address directly to avoid paying the “SF.Net tax”. Now, I agree with SF.Net’s assessment of the situation (”If you make money, so should we, especially since we are effectively hosting your stuff for free, and this costs a lot of money”), but for projects to do this, they are not helping their users, their generous donators, themselves, SF.Net, or the whole FOSS community. So, please, keep the Eeny-Weeny Wrenches and Gears.

Now, I understand you wanted us (the community) to nitpick things, but we can’t even nitpick things until the biggest issues are fixed yet. Sure, dark green is easier to read than light green, but whats the point if the whole system is designed wrong? Kris, come by #sourceforge on irc.slashnet.org sometime, and talk to the people there. You’ll find out what you need to know.