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The software awards scam

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app103:
I posted my thoughts on this at JoS. It's dangerous... I think a can of worms has been opened and there're going to be some real problems.
-Renegade (August 18, 2007, 01:04 AM)
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If the crappy sites that never check anything and hand out bogus awards get hit with PAD spamming, then let it happen. It will make those sites easy for the consumer to spot and they won't bother with them any more.

That will leave only the quality sites left, that actually check what stuff they are posting on their pages.

Rather than being just a bad thing, I think it will be nothing but good.

Renegade:
Rather than being just a bad thing, I think it will be nothing but good.
-app103 (August 18, 2007, 02:59 AM)
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I thought that for a moment, but then thought again to myself that no matter what, another opportunity for spammers just isn't a good thing at all.

Moreover, they will devalue sites that actually matter for software authors. Not a good thing.

Somebody is going to pipe in that these kinds of sites are just garbage anyways and don't matter for authors, but I'm going to have to disagree.

I've got a lot of log data and gone through it. These millions of "nothing" sites do matter. They're the "long tail" where you always get a good amount of traffic after aggregating those sites results. Been there. Done that. They do matter. They might not be great sites, but they matter. "Everything Counts in Large Amounts..." ;)

mouser:
A problem with these sites is they clog up the search results, and make it harder to find the worthwhile sites.

Moreover, because they are all about advertising money, the search engines have a vested interest in not filtering them out, and they are more focused on search-engine optimization and attracting search engines then real sites.

So basically we have a vicious circle where the least useful sites are the most focused on getting high placement on search engines, and search engines make big profits from them.  Not just with software sites of course but most content.

nevf:
Almost every day I get e-mails from these downloads sites telling of the latest and greatest award I've one for Surfulater. These awards are worthless, useless and misleading to folks reviewing software. For these reasons I do not include any of the awards on the Surfulater web site. All these people want is links back to their sites.

And it seems like there are one or two new download sites opening every week.

As for Zane's listing which is quite good, he won't include Surfulater!

My experience with Snapfiles isn't good either, but I've not checked them recently.

It is such a pity there aren't any/many? good software review sites, other than DC of course.

jgpaiva:
I cast another vote for snapfiles.
Since they refused the inclusion of GridMove with VERY good reasons to do so, i've trusted snapfiles several times and only found good software through them.
Now i just hope to have GridMove at the level of being included in snapfiles ;)

PS: at the time, they complained about not having instalation nor help file in a decent format (now it's a simple, quite big txt).

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