If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "FFmpeg contributor" on their CV (or whatever).
I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.
No, it really is draining.
> I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.
It's frustrating when people make "contributions" that take more effort to review than they put in and then get mad when they don't get thanked for it. This attitude is exactly why dealing with drive by pull requests is not "quick and easy" - suddenly you need to do social and public relations stuff when all you want to do is code.
Tools like OpenAI Codex, which can connect directly to repositories, are likely to amplify this problem even further.
That said, this is also the real measure of the actual value of LLMs and coding agents: the day we see top open-source projects having dozens of bugs effectively fixed per day by LLMs, we’ll know they’ve matured into a solid, reliable resource.
My only contribution to node-grpc fixed missing quotes, but only because that produced real crashes.
In my current company nobody cares. It can be seen in the whole code quality. Full of smaller and bigger bugs as well as horrible hacks. It can be seen whether coders look twice or more at their own stuff before putting it to review or not, just trying to avoid ridicolous comments. It's a whole attitude. I write good code in a messy source base is unlikely to work in practice.
That said, I have submitted cleanup commits to open source projects only in the same MR with a real code change I wanted to make and only in vincinity of that change.
> Contributing
> Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.
An agentic LLM bot is likely to have no problems at creating a patch and mailing it but it's a major pain for most human developers. Furthermore they can ban source email addresses and vet potential contributors before letting them in the mailing list.
Or is this because most developers got complacent in only using GitHub and similar?
Tried refreshing, opening in a private windows, same thing.
EDIT: tried it again and got to "Making sure you're not a bot" with the same cringey anime girl, then the site loaded without CSS. Tried one more time, finally it loaded.
EDIT 2: clicked on a link and I'm back to "Oh Noes!...".
I understand where they’re coming from with all the choices made, but honestly I suspect the anubis anime girl and associated sporadic failures (that I’ve seen, too, despite having a rather standard environment) functioning as a filtering mechanism that attracts a certain in-crowd person and makes a lot of others uninterested in staying around, and I think that’s intentional.
and in my personal capacity -
I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.
With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.
They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments
It's just flashing a logo as the equivalent of a loading spinner while it does things. I don't see how the specific logo could possibly be interpreted as tasteless or offensive -- I know I'll take it any day over fucking Corporate Memphis.
> very time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
I'd hope at some point you'd start remembering whose branding it is, that would make things much less confusing for you :-)
Now imagine if the developers of sudo were behind this, now that would be the stuff of nightmares...
It's just art style.
Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.
> classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions
Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.
My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.
I think perhaps you might be overestimating how popular anime is with Americans because of how popular it is on the Internet.
It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.
Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.
> It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them
uh... no, not in my case at least.
I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)
I'm not throwing shade at Forgejo or anything like that, I'm genuinely curious if there's anything about Forgejo that made it a better alternative than the other options.
I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish them luck, but it's not for me.
If if a project requires more maintenance than I could potentially do by myself in a pinch because of complexity or having a massive supply chain of dependencies that keep it on a treadmill I will hesitate to depend on it.
all well and good to host your own code. but from a contributer's point of view, it is between managing dedicated accounts per project you want to participate in...or sign in with github [1]
openid exists, and is arguably older, but odds are most people would not be using it to begin with.
A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more.
Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at that can be unplugged if necessary.
I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.
And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
Having an anime girl show up 99% of the time one visits due to AI bot protection is not the best experience no matter how much I love anime. Saying to “get over it” is dismissive to a large group of people who disagree with you.
The comments are not a cesspool but standard hn being critical.
I think it's cute. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't cute. It's inoffensive and doesn't get in the way of the software serving its function, the only critique I could do if I wanted to is people unfamiliar with the project would get a bit confused if they only saw the character for a split second: https://anubis.techaro.lol/
I think even Cloudflare gives you a second or two to see what's going on before forwarding you to the page behind it, that would be a nice UX improvement.
Otherwise, agreed about self-hosting and the ability to choose whatever platform aligns with your goals the closest to be a good thing!
> And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
A part of me doesn't like the churn of new CI solutions coming in all the time. On the other hand, after learning GitLab CI, I'd generally prefer it to something like Jenkins, it just feels more pleasant. But with something like Drone CI or Woodpecker CI my non-work needs are also covered wonderfully, especially with a lot of the software I build being packaged in Docker containers, which further simplifies and somewhat standardizes things! A lot of the time I can also encapsulate most of the logic in shell scripts that are easy to run regardless of the environment (CI server or locally), which makes it even more portable.
Not if you have the right fingerprint - then you're not even aware the site is using CF.
I’ve contributed to a number of projects that try to self-host, with mixed results. It gets frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds, or when the self-hosted solution goes down for a week because the admin is on vacation and missed something.
I’ve contributed to one server that feels the need to periodically delete dormant accounts for some reason. Every time I come back to the project I find myself creating a new user account.
With the anubis-protected servers the anti-bot protection has a lot of false positives, so occasionally I have to switch browsers just to not deal with page load failures.
One server adopted some black list that had my home IP in it for some reason, so I was just banned from accessing the server without a VPN.
It all just feels old and tiring after a while compared to the breath of fresh air of just using a site like GitLab or GitHub that simply works.
I understand why they’d want to do it, but I don’t think it’s without some tradeoffs.
As a positive side-effect, a contributor is compelled to write a reasonable explanatory message to maintainers and keep the patch minimal and contained (compared to a typical Github PR with a dozen of commits mixing together fixes, features, newlines and indentation changes all over the place).
[0] They did not invent it, obviously—it is what Linux kernel, the origin of Git, had (has?) been doing for a long time!
That's a typical experience when the chosen solution doesn't match the available resources and desired scale. Projects like WordPress and GitLab may work for large enterprises, or when you add in enough caching that you don't have to do the large computation (generating one page) most times, but they don't work so well when you're wanting it to just work without custom solutions as a small team on a small budget
Forgejo doesn't seem to have this issue as far as I've noticed. I've hosted the predecessor (Gitea) on a potato. It's so easy to host, I think it's actually still running but forgotten about. I should check if it needs updating at some point..
Welcome to DE, where _every_ page takes several seconds to load.
I personally couldn't give a rat's ass how it's hosted. Still uses a protocol there's open source clients for? Cool. Not that I have pulled the ffmpeg source more than once in my life (which I suspect's the same for 99% of the people here). I'll continue to get it packaged for me by somebody else, who will pull it from wherever it's hosted, however they can. I'm just glad it still exists.
There's nothing wrong about critical and opinionated but respectful, but the comments that are now flagged, and some of the downvoted ones are very low quality, not just critical and opinionated.
Just shove the issues into Git itself. That's what Fossil does for its wiki and issues, while GitHub only does it for its wiki. There are several open source ways to do this with Git itself.
Yes but that's also the problem. What's the point of doing it in git if whatever choice you make is incompatible with most clients?
- How self-hosted is it? Is it on somebody's computer at home? A colo? One of those university linux servers that runs for decades? Hetzner? Is there any redundancy?
- How are the costs and responsibilities for the hardware broken down?
- How is admin and patching handled?
I'm actually very curious about that stuff, but nobody's really talking about it here
I noticed this. I'm quite appalled. Definitely outside the usual HN standards.
I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.
Are people projecting their GitHub FOMO? Are people thinking that the value of the GitHub they cherish decreases with each project not picking it because of the weaker network effect?
In contrast, whatever its faults, I fully expect public repos on GitHub to last for the next 10 years, likely the next 20, barring active removal by the author. (The biggest medium-term risk is a "GitHub is evil, take down all your repos" campaign a la Reddit.) Of course, it's not foolproof, the only way to get that would be to replicate the project in dozens of places, but I find it much better than the old status quo of files slipping away once forgotten.
Since you're ignoring the reasons by calling them unreasonable, the armchair psychology alternative won't help get you what you love
The cloud companies do not want you to selfhost. It is good that Ffmpeg did not experience a DDOS attack yet, because that's what happened to someone who moved his email to selfhosting. We are living in a time when companies have become like mafia.
Not everyone even has to learn Jenkins/GH-Pipelines/whatever. In most teams I've worked on those are typically managed by one or two people, or by a different team entirely. And it's not even a hard skill to learn.
If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.
FreeBSD because of the cartoon devil? Bash because of the GNU goat with the facial expression that could be read as smug or stoned? Google's logo is some printed characters in primary colours, is that too childish?
Nah, that people have such a visceral reaction to the anime girl is not just because it's "childish" as so much else of our industry is "childish" and passes without comment, or sometimes even causes criticism when it gets taken away for blandness (see all the complaints when projects redesign their logos to Helvetica work marks)
It is a damn sight better than the maliciously-compliant and deeply annoying GDPR 'we use cookies' banners, pop-ups, and dark patterns like having to uncheck thousands of 'partner' boxes.
This is merely a response to AI companies abusing scraper bots and having a callous, selfish disregard for Internet and server bandwidth. It was on this very website where I saw it put quite succinctly—AI-scraping bots have essentially started mass DDOS attacks on all small servers.
> immature
Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more. Not some arbitrary 'this is a cartoon, therefore it is immature'.
25 years ago Microsoft, the professional software behemoth, decided to put a cartoon dog and paperclip with googly eyes in its operating system and office software. A major mobile OS has a cartoon robot in its logo.
Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind. They are much more mature than your shallow portrayal of them.
TCP is even older; so what? It works, as does email. It's merely a transport layer.
What is required is a well-defined standard to encapsulate relevant data into it: PR definitions, code review comments, approval / rejection votes. This all could be a zipped JSON attachment, for instance.
The code change proper can continue be passed in the patch format. Or the whole thing could arrive via an exposed API endpoint, or even be pushed by git protocol.
A tool could interpret the extracted data and update a database that powers a nice GUI / TUI, and controls a CI/CD interface.
(Now if I only had time to properly design and implement that.)
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
But, Anubis uses the plain MIT license, so you can modify it to remove the branding yourself: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE
If Anubis used a license with that mascot requirement, it would not be free and open source.
Just says Invalid Response :(
### July 22nd, 2025, Modernization of contributions
The project is modernizing its contribution methods and switching to a software
forge.
We have setup a platform on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/). The new
process features continuous integration on all commits and merge requests,
labelling for categorization, conflict resolution, and logging in via OpenID or
Github.
The main repository will become
[code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg](https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg), with all
others being mirrored to it. Users are encouraged to begin using it, effective
now.
Mailing lists have supported our development for nearly 25 years, but as more
and more contributors started to become involved, the ratio of merged patches to
total mails begun falling. Mailing lists became a source of friction, with
discussions frequently stalling and uncategorized noise drowning out patches by
bumping them down in inboxes.
Although [patchwork.ffmpeg.org](https://patch.ffmpeg.org/) was set up to track
submissions, it was less than reliable, with many patches and mails slipping
though. Since its activation exactly 9 years ago, it recorded 54,476 patches,
with 53,650 patches having the state of not archived. In comparison, the mailing
list has had a total of 150,736 emails during the same time period.
Additionally, new users have frequently encountered difficulties with mailing
list development. From finding out the correct SMTP login details, configuring
git send-email, new email security mechanisms interfering with mailing list
operations, and finally not having a comfortable workflow to review patches.
After years of discussions, and a vote, we officially announce the new platform,
[code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/), running
[Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/). Documentation will be updated to reflect the
change.
Mailing lists will continue to be monitored, and used for project discussions
and other topics better discussed elsewhere, but traffic and noise should become
significantly reduced over time.
Bugs/issues will be accepted on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/),
alongside with [trac.ffmpeg.org](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/) for the time being.
We are also hoping that this will significantly reduce the amount of unmerged
patches. If you submitted a patch which received no replies or conclusion, we
apologize, and you are encouraged to resubmit it on the new platform.Seems like it doesn't like users who take privacy enhancing measures.
self hosting could drain too much resources I fear.
IMO a list of recent commits would be more useful as a landing page, or maybe even just the readme. When checking out a new project, I'm interested in what it does, not in its folder structure when its LICENSE.md was last modified.
That said, it's a bit like QWERTY. Maybe a bit weird, but it eases quick orientation on a new keyboard or repo if everyone uses the same layout.
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/8030
then it just looks like a bad joke with all the anime girls and everything else...
If I use composite actions, the logs get associated with the wrong step[1]. It's just a visual thing (the steps themselves run fine), but having 90% of your action logs in the "Complete job" step is unpleasant.
For reusable workflows there's a few open issues as well, but what happens in my case is that jobs just don't start at all, they stay as "Waiting" forever.
These issues only matter if you write your own reusable actions with YAML (the actions written in JavaScript seem to work fine), but it's worth mentioning.
Other than these two issues, I'm very happy with Forgejo and would still recommend it if people ask for my opinion.
- The provided reason given was due to user accessibility concerns complicated by what likely is a breaking change.
- Even if you don't agree with the claim, a reserved name isn't unreasonable at all. Not to make a standard of GitHub, but the `admin` username is reserved there too.
- Dismissing an entire product based on a single non-critical technical limitation while simultaneously not contributing to the solution (unless you have a different username there, happy to be corrected) is fundamentally toxic.
- All the while conflating two separate products (Anubis and Forgejo) that aren't related at all.
- And that Anubis offers a non-anime girl solution, and is MIT Licensed if you really don't care for supporting the author.
I'm not going to prod at the "and everything else" part either.
I must be missing something and since mailing lists are dying, would love to understand this relic of the past.
As an old fogey who started with mailing lists, and still uses them to send patches, it's actually much simpler than browser-based workflows. Most of it is your own workflow in your own repo clone in your own environment. The patch and email threads are a universal abstraction; you add the rest yourself, with any method you're familiar with. This removes any complexity that would otherwise be imposed by the browser, remote web app, etc. It's like sending someone a letter in the mail, rather than choosing between 15 different messaging systems, protocols, apps, OSes, etc. If you can read words you can figure out your own way to deal with the contents.
And as far as it dying out: I actually think it's faster to communicate via mailing list. The thing a GitHub clone gets you is co-located collaboration, and CI tests. Those things are very powerful, and really should be integrated into a single open source standard, rather than a lot of custom web apps. But the modern software developer doesn't understand the value of standards.
Seems you have to remember what -v you are sending as you respond to feedback. Pretty troublesome... Glad ffmpeg is moving to a more modern solution.
To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved. One of the main objections to moving to hosted platforms like GitHub or Forgejo is from people who worry it will result in a lot of low quality PRs that have to be dealt with. I’m not suggesting I agree, but it comes up a lot.
If you’re using the git tool, it’s very easy to get it working and easier to use afterwards. It allows you to use you own environment and not someone else’ web app. If you’re the maintainer, people send you patch and you can script out the review phase. If you’re a contributor, it’s actually a few command to send a patch to anyone. And learning how to cleanup your commits is always good.
I can understand the pain if your only email account is gmail. But there are good smtp providers out there.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a clone of Github.
It is possible to migrate from 1.22 to Forgejo simply by changing the binary, and downgrading from 1.24 to 1.23, and from 1.23 to 1.22 is possible if you know your way around PostgreSQL and have a spare hour. I always write downgrade scripts for each release and test them before upgrading Gitea to make sure that I can always back out and move to Forgejo if Gitea folds. Haven't seen much reason to do it up to this moment, though.
edit: for example, here's a 1.23 → 1.22 downgrade script; I don't have access to 1.24 → 1.23 atm:
[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/#why-was-forgejo-create...
Compared to Cloudflare and Google, you can actually talk to a human here and they might (I have no reason to believe the opposite) actually care about niche browsers whereas Google seems to test their products on browsers other than their own engine only after release (presumably people will get annoyed about these breakages/outages eventually and switch to a their browser or a rebrand thereof). There's no such conflict of interest here. I'm not aware of a better thing to use than Anubis or a self-written equivalent (my understanding is that it's a simple sha2 PoW)