marketing-infested flows

[rcjordan]

This is sad.

GIMP abandons SourceForge due to forced ad- and pay-ware installer (gimp.org)

SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites - the green "Download here" buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well.

The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.

[Drastic]

Yep, very sad indeed.

Good move by gimp though. I actually got caught up in this by downloading some crapware when I grabbed something there in a hurry about a month ago. It took me a minute to figure out what happened, thought I had regular old spyware, but nope I installed it myself. First time for everything.

[rcjordan]

>myself

Those green "Download here" buttons are a real PITA.  They caught me once about a year ago.  I can only imagine how many regular users they trick.

Also yahoo just inserted a metric shitton of ads in finance by switching to a new page layout. A layout, btw, that was mentioned here in th3core some months ago as being ripe for ad insertion.

http://finance.yahoo.com/

<added>
scroll the center column

[ergophobe]

Good for GIMP - I had not realized that SF was forcing an installer and that it forced bundled ad offers.  If GIMP hadn't protested, I still wouldn't know, because RC wouldn't have posted this

[rcjordan]

update:

Years later, SourceForge is keeping zombie accounts open

SourceForge grabs GIMP for Windows' account, wraps installer in bundle-pushing adware

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/

from the article, others kept 'active' by SF

Most of the Apache Foundation's projects—including Allura, Derby, Directory Studio, the Apache HTTP server, Hadoop, OpenOffice, Solr, and Subversion;
The Mozilla Project's Firefox, Thunderbird, and FireFTP;
The Evolution and Open-Xchange mail clients;
The Drupal and WordPress content management systems;
The Eclipse, Aptana, Komodo, MonoDevelop, and NetBeans integrated development environments;
The VLC, Audacious, Banshee.fm, Helix, and Tomahawk media players;
The Reaver WPS Wi-Fi hacking tool;
and a host of games, utilities, and other applications.

[ergophobe]

It seems like most of this comes on the heels of the Dice.com acquisition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Acquisition

[rcjordan]

Update (8:40pm CT): Shortly after this story was published, SourceForge's community team announced a change via blog post: "In an effort to address a number of concerns we have been hearing from the media and community at large, we at SourceForge would like to note that we have stopped presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects." 

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/sourceforge-locked-in-projects-of-fleeing-users-cashed-in-on-malvertising/