I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev?
Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. They coined the whole "social coding" thing. I find that whenever I interact with other people on the site, I actively look at their profiles, their contributions, etc.
An example of a recent-ish feature they added which IMO is a good example of "focus on the dev": Comment authors are tagged as "Owner", "Member", "Contributor" and "First-time contributor" in comment streams.
I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev?
Yes. There are always trade-offs, especially when you're adding user-facing features as slowly as GitHub [1]. The author tags are one of very few that focus on individual developers. About the only other one I can think of is the option to curate the repositories that appear on your profile page (welcome, but took years of asking...)
[1] Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing -- stability is good, and GitHub's launch feature set turns out to be a pretty good match for what I want)
No, it became atrocious. The world moved on and SourceForge did not, which is why superior offerings arrived.
And to your first "question", no. It had them in almost exactly the same incarnation as modern sites, but with a UX design language rooted (fatally) in the "best practices" of the web at the time. Unlike all the crazy things you'd have to do around FTP to get it to act like DropBox, SourceForge had the mentioned features built in from the start.
It doesn't really win GitHub any prizes to pretend otherwise, so I'm not sure why the pushback against simple facts.
Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. They coined the whole "social coding" thing. I find that whenever I interact with other people on the site, I actively look at their profiles, their contributions, etc.
An example of a recent-ish feature they added which IMO is a good example of "focus on the dev": Comment authors are tagged as "Owner", "Member", "Contributor" and "First-time contributor" in comment streams.