SugarForge Reviews

[mvngti]

I have a problem with the (limited) Reviews feature on SugarForge.

Simply put, any fool can write a review and the developer has no way to respond to a negative review.
Someone that did not read the README or compatibility notes can install a BETA module on his production system, break it, then blame the module and give it a low rating - meanwhile he is the idiot.

At the very least the review system should allow developers to reply to bad reviews or even better remove idiotic mistaken reviews.

M

[salesagility]

Completely agree .. as one who in the past has jumped to conclusions too quickly (usually late at night when the day has had its toll) and had no opportunity to review or amend my comments ...

But, there's a wider problem with the forge:

There's no way of knowing what contributions are active at a glance
There's no way of knowing when contributions were last updated ... at a glance
There's no way of amending comments or reviews
There's no way of knowing what contributions are relevant for particular versions at a glance

This makes using the Forge quite difficult. I have spent many fruitless hours trawling the forge to see what's happening and 80% of the time is useless because I'm clicking into projects that are dead, or inactive or for previous versions.

But the biggest problem may actually be SugarCRM's commitment to community contributions in general. I know that I'm a broken record sometimes. But SugarCRM is a proprietary software company leveraging Open Source in order to market their paid-for software and as such has no great interest in seeing the community eating its lunch.

Over the last few years, Sugar has been disengaged from its community. I sense that this is changing ... but would really like to see some investment in the Forge ... which hasn't really changed in four years.

So, come on SugarCRM ...

[SugarDev.net]

well, take your pick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...ing_facilities :P

I believe sugarforge runs on an outdated version of sourceforge..or am i wrong?

[eggsurplus]

I've had the same exact issue as mvngti and as a result I've had to just turn off the reviews feature which is too bad for obvious reasons. The issues that salesagility posts are also of interest to both developers like myself and to end users.

[matthew]

This is excellent feedback from all of you.

Right now, I will be making some subtle changes to SugarForge, which you won't likely notice. Basically the changes will be to track how people are using the site, so that I can make changes to how it can be used better.

With that said, I will try to get a method to help clean up the dead projects, but it will likely be a crowdsourcing option and I will need your help.

@salesagility

When you are talking about "the contributions", are you talking about contributions to other people's projects or your own?

@SugarDev.net

It's an outdated gForge We will likely update to the newest gForge, since that's our domain expertise. kForge looks interesting though, since I love python/django and it has git support.

What do you guys like?

[mvngti]

Tx matthew,

upgrading to the latest gforge would obviously be an advantage.

But meanwhile, the people that responded on this thread or all major contributors to the forums and the forge. How about just taking some nominations for removing old/dead projects and useless reviews as a start?
Temporary fix of course but a good start.

M

[salesagility]

I second the thanks from mvngti.

It's not straightforward the cutoff for what is dead wood and what's not. A lot of Mr Milk's contributions for early versions of 4.x were great and may well still be relevant for that generation of users ... but they haven't been updated in a few years ... so date of update is not a good indicator.

Where projects have been started and no code contributed within x months (12?) of project start might get rid of a lot of dead wood.

I'm happy to help if help is required.

[salesagility]

@salesagility

When you are talking about "the contributions", are you talking about contributions to other people's projects or your own?

Matthew ... I didn't answer your question

When I was talking about contributions, I meant all Projects in the Forge.... apologies if this was not clear.

[SugarDev.net]

Well, I would prefer a system that can ignite community effort.

And, as is true with other aspects of Sugar, I can hardly imagine that the developer's position would be enough for Sugar itself. Try to imagine yourself dealing with SugarForge's review system, bug reporting, forums, etc. for the SugarCRM project. I would say: Get a system that's good enough for SugarCRM core, it will be good enough for contributions.

As I have limited experience with these systems, I'm going to forgo any specific recommendations .

[matthew]

Step 1. Get rid of the noise - I could use your help on this one....

I added a link that allows you to vote for stale projects to be removed.

I will work on removing projects that have 0 activity, etc from the backend, but I need your help from the front end...

I just posted a blog post about it.