Hi. Much appreciated for your good deed. It's unfortunate that the previous owners put a seemingly permanent black mark on the once-beloved SourceForge brand, but I think you need to not take it personally. Most of us, me included, simply don't know what's going on inside SourceForge, or GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, our only view in being headlines and rumors.

We can't all be experts, but we all need to make a choice, and "that site that started posting malware" is not a compelling option no matter what happened afterwards. This is super unfortunate, but it's true, and I imagine it's the same reason why web filters and reputation indexes have been unkind.

But I think that's not even the worst problem. SourceForge was definitely on a decline before the adware incident. Like, many of us will feel uneasy about GitHub under MS, and I already don't know how much I trust young venture capitalist funded websites with my important data. Still, GitHub changed the game with their non-advertising-based profit model and now it feels weird to even consider going back. Frankly, I feel a bit dirty when downloading FOSS from a page with ads and a countdown even though SourceForge is not the only one doing that.

Truthfully, I do want to love SourceForge the way we all used to, but I find it challenging. The adware-supported installers just felt like a super evil extension of the profit model SourceForge already had, and the association in my head stuck. I doubt I'm the only one.

None of this is fair to you, the person trying to fix all of this, but of course whether it's fair or not isn't going to matter. Insulting people who aren't giving you a fair shake is probably not going to help your case, though I certainly sympathize with you.