Ohloh Frequently Asked Questions
If your question is not answered here, check our forums or send email to info@ohloh.net.
Projects
Oops! I added a project by mistake. How do I delete it?
From the project's main page, click the "Edit" tab, then choose "History" from the sub-menu. At the bottom of the history list you will see an item called "Created project". Click the Undo link beside this item to delete the project.
My project report looks completely wrong!
If something in your report looks completely out of line, post in our forums or send us email and we'll be happy to investigate the problem.
It's possible that your project is written in a language that Ohloh doesn't recognize, or that your source control repository has an unusual configuration. Be sure that you've given us the correct URL and module names for your source code server.
Our source control analysis is one of the most accurate available, and quite often the results are surprising to project participants.
How often is my project report updated?
All projects on Ohloh are automatically updated on a rotating basis. Most projects on Ohloh are updated every 48 hours, but we are occasionally slower than this. Our server farm prioritizes new projects over updates to existing ones, so during heavy traffic periods we may fall behind on updates.
A chart of our update progress and more detailed explanation can be found on the status page.
If you are simply desperate for an updated report, drop us a line. We are usually able to schedule an update for you within a few hours.
Please add support for my language!
Although the number of computer languages supported by Ohloh is growing rapidly, there are always more languages to be implemented.
Languages are indentified and analyzed by Ohcount, an open source line counting application. The source code and bug tracker are available at the Ohloh Labs web site. Feel free to create a new ticket to request support for a new language. Better yet, everyone benefits when you contribute a source code patch to add support for a new language.
How are related projects determined?
Project relationships are created when projects have tags in common. For tips on refining your project's tags to get good results from our project matching algorithm see the tagging tips page.
Source Control
Do you support my source control system?
Currently, Ohloh supports only CVS, Subversion, and Git. More systems are planned for the future. Mail us with your requests -- we'll evaluate which to add depending on demand. Meanwhile, there might be a workaround: there are some popular tools to convert repositories from one format to another. This might work for you.
Ohloh failed to download my source code -- now what?
We constantly monitor our system for failed downloads, so usually you don't need to do anything. If the download process remains stuck for a day or two, there may be some special problems that we might require help with, so you might want to drop us a line.
Please resist the temptation to add the same repository again. It will almost certainly fail again, and may complicate the original download.
Common causes of failed downloads:
- The source control server timed out, or there were network issues. Downloading the entire history of a project can take a long time, and many source control servers can be unreliable. This is by far the most frequent cause of failure.
- The CVS server does not support the "rlog" command. This is required by our system.
- The Subversion server does not support the "info" command. This is required by our system.
- The Subversion repository is corrupted, or someone actually checked a hidden .svn folder into the repository. We can usually work around this issue by skipping over the revisions which are corrupted; let us know if this is the case in your repository.
I don't use any source control. Does Ohloh support tarballs?
Not directly. Our system does more than analyze a snapshot of the code. We examine the full history of all changes to the code, and attribute each one to an individual contributor. A simple tarball of the source code doesn't contain this history.
All is not lost, however. If you insist on working around this, you could simply push your code into a repository, then upload it to Ohloh. This can be done fairly easily. You could use a free online forge service, or perhaps the easiest workaround is to import the project into a local Git repository and then open access to it so that Ohloh can upload it. You can find Git here.
My project moved to a new repository. What should I do?
If it's possible, the best solution is to import all of the history from the old repository into the new repository, preserving a continuous timeline of ongoing development.
If you can't do this, Ohloh does support multiple repositories per project. In this case, all of the activity from both repositories will be combined to make a single report. However, this doesn't usually work out well because the old repository still contains a full copy of the code even though it has been duplicated in the new repository. This results in the project showing twice the actual number of lines of code. Unfortunately, Ohloh doesn't have any current solution to this problem.
An alternative solution is to create a separate project for each repository and label them accordingly (for example, "My Project 1.0" and "My Project 2.0").
A developer on my project uses more than one name. Can I combine the statistics?
Yes. If some developers on a project have used different name spellings in the source control system, you can combine these names together using contributor aliases. To create aliases,
Open the "Edit" tab of the project page, and click the "Aliases" sub-menu. This might take you to http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3692/aliases if your project were 3692.
Click the "add a new alias" button.
Pick a name you previously used from the first drop-down, then choose the name you prefer from the second drop-down (the one you already claimed most likely).
If you have more than 2 contributions, you may need to repeat this.
A contributor alias applies to all of the repositories in a single project. This feature cannot be used to combine statistics from more than one project.
Accounts
How do I change my avatar image?
Avatar images on Ohloh are provided by Gravatar, a service which allows you to use a single avatar image across all Gravatar-enabled web sites. Sign up for a free Gravatar account to associate your email address with an avatar image.
How do I change my email address?
Go to your profile page by clicking the "My Profile" button on the top of your browser. Now click the Edit tab and then the Change Password link.
After I signed up for Ohloh, I lost all my kudos!
Your kudos are not lost, they are merely not visible until the next nightly update.
All new accounts on Ohloh are assigned a default KudoRank of 1. Ohloh recalculates kudo scores only once each day. If you take actions that will change your KudoRank, you will not see the change until after the daily update.
For example, there may be already be some kudos associated with some code you wrote for a project. If you associate this code with your Ohloh account, it may take 24 hours before these kudos are transfered to your account. During this time, the project report and your account page will both show your existing account KudoRank, which is only 1 if your account is new.
I contributed to a project under two names but Ohloh won't let me claim the second name. Do you support this?
Yes. Confusingly, you have to use the alias feature.
Stacks
What is a stack?
A stack is the set of programs that are combined to create a software system. The most common example of a stack is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python). On Ohloh, the stack is all the open source projects you use in your software system.
How do I add a project to my stack?
From a project page, click on StackIt! in the upper left of the page.
It looks like: 