Download TWiki from SourceForge instead of TWiki.org

We currently host the TWiki tarballs on twiki.org, which can be downloaded from DownloadTWiki and TWikiForWindowsPersonal. We have also other distributions that are hosted on other sites: TWikiInstallers, TWikiVMDebianStable.

What about moving all TWiki tarballs to the TWiki project on SourceForge? This has the following benefits:

• Accurate 3rd party download statistics (current TWikiDownloadStatistics on twiki.org are broken for some time now)
• More exposure on SourceForge website (the TWiki project will be seen as active again on SourceForge, e.g. move up from 76.02 Activity Percentile)
• Less bandwidth use on twiki.org (be nice to hosting provider)

We currently have around 10K downloads a month of the .zip and .tgz tarballs alone. This does not inlude the external TWikiInstaller distributions or the TWikiVMDebianStable distribution.

For comparison, MediaWiki has 8K+ downloads a month and 95.62 activity percentile (as of March 2008).

I suggest we move all our distros to SourceForge, e.g. the ones from DownloadTWiki, TWikiInstallers, TWikiVMDebianStable and TWikiForWindowsPersonal. That is, we keep those pages but fix the download links to point to the relevant package on SourceForge. I do not know how many downloads of the TWikiInstallers and TWikiVMDebianStable we have, but we probably get way over the 10K downloads a month.

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 12 Mar 2008

Discussion

I agree - it was 'nice' to have it all in one place, but it is certainly not using our resources efficiently. Similarly, we should be able to offload commonly used attachments to geographically distributed servers (ie, not updated except when upgrading TWiki) - speeding up requests. (I made a feature request for that once - I'll have to dig it up)

-- SvenDowideit - 12 Mar 2008

I agree on the proposal too. On attachments, do you mean the icons, images, css and js things necessary for browsing twiki.org? Then maybe just a long expire (and pre-gzipping them to serve them gzipped) maybe a first step? I remember you proposed the Exipre trick some time ago. On my site I have configured apache to have an expire of one month for all attachments of Main and TWiki webs.

-- ColasNahaboo - 12 Mar 2008

I didn't just propose, TWiki.org uses an 11 day expire and etags, and it made a major difference to both the server load, and to the apparent speed.

-- SvenDowideit - 12 Mar 2008

Erm, 10K downloads a month is not much

-- MichaelDaum - 12 Mar 2008

Good, over 2 weeks passed and we have agreement.

I uploaded the TWiki 4.1.2 and 4.2.0 files to the TWiki project on SourceForge, direct link http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3657. I also fixed the links in the TWikiRelease04x02x00 download page to link directly to the files on SourceForge. Watch the TWiki download stats on SourceForge in the next few days.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Apr 2008

This sounds like an excellent move and it sounds like Sourceforge has the potential to create extra marketing buzz for TWiki.

I am not familiar with SourceForge but was wondering if there are other pages that we need to update - such as http://twiki.sourceforge.net/ ?

-- MichaelCorbett - 02 Apr 2008

Yes, we can add some more pointers to our website.

There are other ways to attract attention as well. I just added an invisible SourceForge logo to the copyright notice on TWiki.org's TWiki. We are not hosted on SF, so we are not required to do so. However, loading the SF logo image (http://sflogo.sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=3657&type=1) on every page view on twiki.org will show that TWiki is an active project in the SF statistics.

Watch the SF statistics in the next few days: http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=3657&ugn=twiki

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Apr 2008

We have good results: 400+ downloads on weekdays and around 200 downloads on weekends, e.g. 350 downloads a day in average. Details: http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=3657&ugn=twiki&type=prdownload

Also, the twiki project rank improved from around 35,000 to rank 380. Details: http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=3657&ugn=twiki&type=&mode=60day

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Apr 2008

Clever move! Would it not be nice to put the Plug-ins on SourceForge too? TWiki is already number one in "CMS Systems" and "Wiki" categories.

-- StephaneLenclud - 12 Apr 2008

I would not want to loose the ability to automatically upload plugins using the BuildContrib just to get a higher Sourceforge score.

Making a release on Sourceforge requires quite many steps. I run two other projects where I use Sourceforge for downloads.

It would also mean that all Plugin authors need upload access to the TWiki project on Sourceforge. Not feasible.

-- KennethLavrsen - 12 Apr 2008

Of course if the SourceForge release process can't be automated through BuildContrib then it's out of question.

-- StephaneLenclud - 13 Apr 2008

BTW where can we get the download statistics for the plug-ins? That would be a nice thing to have to rank plug-ins by popularity.

-- StephaneLenclud - 14 Apr 2008

We do not have stats for plugins at this time, although the info is in the Apache logs. Agreed that this would be useful metrics.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Apr 2008

We should be able to collate them from the awstats page?

-- SvenDowideit - 15 Apr 2008