Frustrations with gitlab.com

I really hate to bring this up. I don’t want to change hosting platforms again. I don’t even want to spend time discussing it. So I’ll keep this short. I have three complaints:

  1. The UI, especially for issue tracking, is terrible. It’s slow as molasses, and is spread haphazardly across many different pages, making it hard to find what you’re looking for (which exacerbates the speed issue, since getting somewhere is going to involve multiple page loads).

  2. You need to solve a reCAPTCHA after repeatedly editing an issue, among some other things. GitLab knows about this issue, but I have not seen anything that convinces me they intend to fix it. It’s been reported many times, so I won’t link them all, but here’s the most upvoted/discussed issue and the most recent communication from a GitLab employee.

  3. Recently(?) you can no longer log using Firefox if privacy.resistFingerprinting is enabled in your about:config. Because, in the words of the linked post, “Cloudflare’s anti-privacy, overly intrusive ddos prevention system - which gitlab is now using - requires browser fingerprinting”.

I’m not proposing anything at this time, but moving away is on my mind. :tired_face:

1 Appreciation

This definitely is relevant at least to the someday blog post I want to write about how and why code and issue management has been such a pain and such a frustrating part of our delayed slow progress over the years.

Broadly, a world in which this sort of problem didn’t exist and great FLO solutions were everything we’d wish is a world in which there’d be less need for Snowdrift.coop (or rather getting that world is our mission).

1 Appreciation