What’s better than totally legal peer-to-peer file sharing? Not much, right? This month’s Project of the Month, Shareaza, is a cool way to way to get your hands on more than 15 million songs and videos.

Shareaza’s developers say there’s lots of things that make this project unique. “It is probably the only app that supports completely all features of the G2 network, it allows advanced control of downloads and searches and all aspects of the application, it can search by various hashes: sha1, tiger, ed2k, md5, btih (this also allows for revival of dead torrents by search torrent sources using btih over G2 and also allow to download from other networks the same file).”

There’s more, too, and you can read all about it right here.

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Things seem particularly contentious this election year, and everyone can only really agree on one thing: there’s an awful lot at stake. Are you nervous? We are too. To settle the debate, we polled over 250 random SourceForge.net and Slashdot users on a wide range of political issues…because, after all, you guys are not known for mincing your words. We figured that if anyone can get to the bottom of this, you can.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s no need to wait until next week because the results are in! The open source community has spoken.

Our polls showed Obama with an almost 2:1 edge over McCain in the US, but internationally the ratio was a staggering 37:1.

But there’s more.

more…

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Hey! Wanted to let you all know that Daniel Hinojosa, our support manager, will be talking about a day in the life of your typical open source support ninja at the Ontario Linux Fest in Toronto on Saturday, October 26th. Want to learn the hidden secrets that the pros know and you don’t? If you’re going to be in town, you should stop by. I’ll also be there providing moral support and paying for everybody’s beer.

There will be a preview presentation at the seventh annual FSOSS conference at Seneca@York on the 24th too, because the only thing better than seeing Daniel talk about SourceForge is seeing Daniel talk about SourceForge twice. Hope to see you there!

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concrete5 is one of those projects that’s going places. It’s a content management system (CMS) that’s built in PHP and provides the magic behind some really cool websites, like GereDonovan.com and SchoolPulse.com.

One great goal of concrete5 is to make website building and maintenance approachable. “We think websites are kind of like homes; you want a professional to build the bones, but a lot of home owners do great DIY work on their own. We continually push c5 to be a flexible building material for developers, and easy for the eventual site owner to feel comfortable using,” says CEO Franz Maruna.

Even if you’re not shopping for a CMS right now, take a look at the answers the guys from concrete5 provided for the Project of the Month questionnaire. I don’t know what’s funnier; their responses or the pictures they provided.

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Hi folks,

We’re bringing the Remember Me feature back!

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Remember Me, this feature allows you to click a check box at log in time, and not have to log in the next time you come to the site. This feature is scheduled to roll out later this week. Be on the lookout for this on the log in page as well as the announcement of roll out via Site Status (https://sourceforge.net/sitestatus) page.

This feature was turned off last November due to an issue that kind of hosed things up. We’ve revamped it and have added some more features to make it even better than before. Check it out:

- All logged in users will be over SSL (If you’re logged in and manually access an http,non-SSL, link, you will not be shown to be logged in)
- There is opt-in IP session restrictions
- Remember me lasts two weeks and the counter is reset upon site access
- You can now invalidate your own sessions, this is for if you have multiple sessions (see your Account page - https://sourceforge.net/account)

We also enabled the Remember Me feature for use with OpenID.

Finally, along with this change, we are also updating user accounts so that all accounts can add a security question. On implementation (Jan. 2008), this feature only allowed for new accounts to set a security question. With this, we are requiring password authentication for email, password changes, security question/answer, and OpenID bindings.

Check out the Remember me feature and set a security question if you don’t have one! If you run into any issues, you know where to find us (https://sourceforge.net/projects/alexandria/support/ ;).

Cheers!

Daniel.

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It’s been a few months since we started rolling out our new UI, and we’ve completed the front page, the project summary page, the download file listing page (which we call the “showfiles page”), and the page that shows after the file starts downloading (which we call the “thank you” page.) In essence, we’ve redone the most highly visited pages, the ones for downloaders.

You may be wondering why. I think the most important goal is to provide a simpler user experience to the 95% of our audience that just want their damn files so they can get on with their lives. SourceForge.net is a complex site with lots of hidden nooks and crannies; downloaders are here with a clear purpose and need to be shown a clear path.

Naturally, there’s also a branding aspect to the new UI. We want people to know that they’re downloading from SourceForge.net, and that they, too, can create a project here. We wanted our message to be clear and strong, but not to get in people’s way.

The same is true for the messages from our advertisers. Yes, they pay the bills around here and, yes, we can’t exist without them, but we have to be a bit intelligent about it…an ad experience that pisses everyone off is useless to advertisers, too. Moving things around a bit allows us to show higher quality advertising at higher prices…and, therefore, to show less of it.

There are a lot of strong opinions in our feedback forum, and while I think that venue is probably disproportionally negative, that feedback is extremely valuable to us and we’re tweaking our design based on it. I’ve been keeping an eye for any mention of SourceForge.net on Twitter and it feels like about 40% love it, 40% don’t like it, and 20% aren’t really sure what their opinion is (even though they feel strongly enough to express it.)

What do you think?

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Hello, SourceForgers! I’m doing a trip through Europe with some colleagues in what I’m calling the SourceForge Eats the World tour (because we can’t stop eating the delicious, delicious food here.)

I’m going to be attending the European Open Source Think Tank next week in Paris, hosted by the Olliance Group and Linagora. Olliance’s event in Napa, California last year was one of the best I attended by far (and I go to a ton of events.) I came home with a lot of new ideas about how SourceForge.net can be a better custodian for the open source community; it made my world a little bit larger. Naturally, I have high expectations for this year’s event. If you’re going to be there, let me know (rturk@corp.sourceforge.com) and we’ll connect!

After the OSTT concludes, Paris Capitale du Libre is being hosted by Linagora at Maison Internationale de Paris. I think I’ll be part of a panel on Wednesday morning about open source trends, and I’m looking forward to it. Hope to see you there.

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If you’re a regular user of our Tracker, you should go take a closer look after our most recent deployment on Monday.

At the top of each of the Tracker pages, you’ve now got the option to try our new Tracker Beta. Our design team went to work on it, with the goal of making it more enjoyable to use. It’s not functionally different, although it may seem like it because some features are now a little easier to find. You can see an example over at Gallery’s bug tracker.

I think it’s purty. It’s like the old Tracker but with 100% less suck. If you agree, or you have something else to say about it, go to our feedback forum - we’ll be there.

You might call it a new coat of paint, and we’ve being doing a lot of that lately. Rest assured, though; our toolbox contains a lot more than paintbrushes. Monday’s deployment also launched Hosted Apps, an entirely new service offering for our projects and their communities. More to come on that.

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Well, guess what… We made some changes around here and man, did you all notice! We’ve taken a ton off feedback on that, going both ways! We’ve been listening and we’re trying new things and will keep doing that till we get it right. That’s why I’m writing, to let you know what we’re up to!

First, we’re making some changes to some of the new site design that are already out there. I posted a note on some changes that are gonna drop on Monday, in the Community Hub User Interface Feedback forum.

We’re also working on some changes to the project Trackers. I put a post in the UI forum that gives some detail on most of the changes. That’s gonna show up on Monday too.

We’ve heard your input loud and clear. We’re working on responding and incorporating what works, logging other stuff for future changes, and queuing up others for upcoming updates.

Your input is important. Please try out the new Tracker and give us your feedback in the UI forum so that we can continue to improve on the design and function.

Cheers!

Daniel Hinojosa - the SourceForge.net support guy.

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Our good friend Joe Brockmeier, community manager for openSUSE, has just started blogging for ZDnet. In one of his inaugural posts, he ruminates over where a community manager belongs in corporate structure: engineering or marketing? His post was in response to Stormy Peters, who thinks the support team is a good place. As a fellow community manager, these posts are a fantastic opportunity for me to talk about a subject that’s near and dear to me: me.

I report to the VP of Marketing, and I won’t be shy about telling you that’s caused me a bit of stress. As an engineer, I always thought that marketing was just the art of yelling at the top of your lungs about some crappy product to people who don’t care, but that’s only true in organizations that don’t understand marketing. Marketing departments generally fall into two categories: ones that shout at the market and and ones that talk with it. The defining difference is whether marketing is an inspiration for the company’s strategy or merely its slave.

If my job were to coordinate bug fixes with upstream providers or negotiate solutions to interoperability issues (like it probably is for Joe Brockmeier from Novell), it’d probably make sense to think of it as an engineering discipline. If it were to find ways for developers to contribute to our application or govern the ones that already do (as it probably is for someone like Stormy at Gnome) it might be more appropriate under a product management team.

However, we’re dealing with a community of scale where our role is to provide the environment where people can produce - not to coordinate their actual production. So community management at SourceForge.net is about observing the community as a whole, engaging as much as we can, and tweaking the platform so that people can get more done. Since our marketing team is a “talking” team and not a “shouting” one, community management fits there nicely.

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