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Chinese Software Developer Network

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CSDN
Type of site
Internet forum
Available inChinese
URLcsdn.net
CommercialYes

The "Chinese Software Developer Network" or "China Software Developer Network", (CSDN), operated by Bailian Midami Digital Technology Co., Ltd., is one of the biggest networks of software developers in China. CSDN provides Web forums, blog hosting, IT news, and other services. CSDN has about 10 million registered users and is the largest developer community in China.

Services offered

  • Web forums with a ranking system and similar topics.
  • Blog hosting [1], with 69,484 bloggers at April 7, 2005;
  • Document Center [2], a selection of blog articles.
  • IT News [3].
  • IT job hunting [4] and training [5] services;
  • online bookmark service [6]

Web Forum

The CSDN community website is where Chinese software programmers seek advice. A poster describes a problem, posts it in the forum with a price in CSDN points, and then waits for replies. On some popular boards, a poster wil get a response in a few hours, if not minutes. Most replies are short but enough to point out the mistake and give possible solutions. Some posts include code and may grow to several pages. The majority of posts are written in Simplified Chinese, however Traditional Chinese and English posts are not uncommon. The culture of sharing knowledge and helping each other are dominant in CSDN [7].

Topics are mainly IT related and focused on programming, but political and life topics are also active. It was closed for two weeks in June 2004, likely for political reasons because many political words, such as the names of political leaders and organizations are banned in posts since then. However, political discussions are still active using intentional misspelling.

Blog

The site hosts several excellent IT blogs, but the large number of bloggers made them hard to find and made the server slow. At December 2005, Baidu rates CSDN blog as one of the top Chinese blog service providers.[8]

Collaboration with Microsoft

CSDN started cooperation with Microsoft at 2002, and several Microsoft technical supports have provided their support in CSDN forums since then. It is also a major source of Chinese Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals.

Criticism

Some people complained about the CPU consuming XML page format of the web forum. Other complained over its unfriendly interface in browsers other than Internet Explorer. Nevertheless, the web site got 1.3 million hits everyday, according to Alexa[9].

User information leakage

In Dec, 2011, 6,000,000 user information of CSDN was reported to be leaked[10][11]. This serious security problem is caused by storing users password in clear text without any hashing/encryption in CSDN database.

See also