(And yes, fake download buttons on a site serving binary downloads went exactly where you'd expect.)
Yes and today Ad-Sense (Google) took the Crown from being then biggest Scam AD's deploy-er.
And really i don't think that's true before they where sold, ad's sure, scam/malware stuff? I don't think so...at least i cant remember.
But SF had FTP, Websites, SVN hosting and i think even a WIKI, so you can hardly compare it with Google-Code...and hey at least they opensource'd their "forge":
IDK i don't have such bad memory's about SF, even today you serve big files over SF because of GH limits.
True after slashdot got buy'd, they also served malware AFTER the takeover (2013), and now look at that year:
Allura graduated from incubation with the Apache Software Foundation in March >>2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Allura
Google-Code was in 2006 right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy
After slashdot was purchased from condenast (i think?)