At the presentation on Tuesday night (on the commercial issues of Open Source software) I was asked if it was possible to manipulate the Sourceforge rankings. Unfortunately the website was mostly down at the time, so it wasn't possible to answer immediately.
However, I have taken a quick look tonight and note that the Sourceforge.net rankings are able to be manipulated if one wanted to do so, as the formula is quite clear. However, as Sourceforge.net notes, those statistics are not the only way by which a project should be assessed. The ranking statistics are a good indicator of the project's activity level rather than the quality of that activity.
The point should be made that the incentive of an project author to manipulate the rankings process is fairly low given that, in general, the potential monetary gain would be fairly minimal.
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