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How/why are FOSS projects validated by name in the profile section on Ohloh?

I was all excited to go back and think about all the various free software projects I've been involved with & document them on my profile page.

I started with a Fidonet gateway application that 3-4 people in NE Ohio developed & released as open source between 1990 & 1994. But, I was FORCED to tag it as closed source because it failed the form validation by project name (the error was that no such open source project could be found).

What gives?? Where does it have to be found? What's the point of such a validation rule?

The software, neardog, is nearly forgotten (it never had much adoption outside half a dozen area codes) and I was hoping to put it on the historical record here.

Open source was not widely known or understood in the mainstream BBS scene of the 80s and 90s -- the closest thing was freeware.

Now, I'm wondering about some of the other projects I've worked on. I'm not sure how they'll pass the form validation because they either predate or don't use sforge or github or whatever.

Maybe someone at Ohloh could fire up a sql console and manually switch the status to open source where project name = 'neardog'?

I don't see the point in validating projects like this ... nor do I see how Ohloh can really be thorough when validating projects based on their name. There must be a ton of false negatives.

ryan bagueros almost 14 years ago
 

Ok, well, I posted first & then went searching for existing info. That's on me - sorry.

I found this forum thread discussing similar complaints ...

I presume the answer to my complaint is that Ohloh is focused on the integrity of the statistics being gathered and you don't want a bunch of 2-line bash scripts that change the prompt & etc to skew the measurements.

I guess I don't understand why projects for user profiles couldn't be flagged as either confirmed or unconfirmed, a property that could determine if the project is included in anything related to official stats.

One suggested solution that I read in the archived thread -- to just use the 500-word About Me to talk about unverifiable experience -- is definitely not a user-friendly solution.

Anyway, I imagine my forum search didn't uncover all of the past discussion on this topic ... I apologize again. I know it's annoying for people working on more important site maintenance tasks.

OTOH, some of those threads are rather old and the accuracy vs. user experience topic isn't addressed in the FAQ or About Ohloh pages or Add Project page. The pop-up tip that appears when you're adding the project name doesn't mention it.

The point is: it was only when I clicked the form submit button -- after spending 15 - 20 minutes trying to figure out exactly when the code base was active back in the early 90s & working on a nice project description -- that the red, bold form validation error told me that I couldn't add the project.

That's a pretty disheartening UI experience for a new user.

The only reason I'm taking this much time to blab on about it now is that I'm excited with this site's concept, its functionality and its contribution to the free software community.

For every person who takes the time to actually give feedback (especially such verbose feedback), there are probably 10 - 12 users who just get frustrated & confused with the expectation mismatch and become less interested in building out the content here or even returning to the site.

Anyway, I'd love to browse obscure or niche or old projects like the one I added as well as use the stats tools you provide (with as much accuracy as possible). I don't see how those are mutually exclusive features.

It seems like I'm not the only one who thinks this way and implementing a solution seems so easy.

Ok, end rant.

software livre sempre! -ryan

ryan bagueros almost 14 years ago
 

Hi ryan,

Our validation is simply trying to look up the project in our database. Just because the project isn't in our database yet doesn't mean that we consider it to be closed source; it just means that our database is far from complete.

The solution is to add your unknown projects to our database. Anyone can add a new project toOhloh. If your projects are old or obscure, it's very likely that we don't know about them yet.

I'm sorry this wasn't easy to figure out -- there are a lot of rusty spots in the Ohloh UI design.

The other challenge will be finding the source control repository for these projects. If they're old, they may not have any source control systems available on the web. If that is the case, then Ohloh won't be able to process the source code statistics. However, you are still welcome to add the projects to our database without the source control links.

Let me know if you have any more questions, I'm happy to help.

Robin

Robin Luckey almost 14 years ago