Warning: Your company identity has been stolen. Seriously.
The owners of publish-me.com have taken it upon themselves to modify our (as in, the shareware industry, as a whole) PAD files. They have replaced all of the contact info and links to point to their site instead of yours.
The worst part is that they are reportedly submitting these PAD files to other shareware archives in an effort to draw traffic away from your site, to theirs. The ads on their site seem to be mostly porn-related, meaning that innocent visitors to their site may now associate your program with their less-than-innocent advertising.
Look up your program there. If you find it, you'll see a PAD link just below the listing. Check it out and you just might see who has stolen your company identity. Three of my programs are already listed on this site, and I'm sure their bot will get to the rest, soon.
Personally, I'm mad as hell, and I hope I'm not the only one. Not only is this underhanded and scummy, it's also quite possibly copyright infringement. If you find your programs listed on this site, this is the contact info listed on their page: Email the webmaster Stephen Huff at WebMaster@Publish-me.com.
Update - 8/15/05
Presumably due to the several phone calls Stephen Huff received throughout the night, and the several calls and emails to easycgi.com, Huff's web host, it seems that most of the offending content has been either removed from his site, or hidden. However, there is still the issue of the derivative PAD files that have been submitted to several shareware sites. Hopefully, we can spread the word to archives that have accepted these bogus PAD submissions and get them to take action.
FYI - publish-me.com and its sister site have a form you can submit to "disable" your PAD on their site. Several authors are reporting that the form does, in fact, disable the PAD on their site, but apparently automatically submits the modified PAD to several other (related?) sites at the same time. This hardly seems like a solution. I'll report more as I know more.
5 Comments:
Thank you Mike for helping me get this information out there to every developer possible.
Best regards,
Martha
Martha Seward
Freelance Works
http://www.freelanceworks.com
The web master of Publish-Me.com put his own home phone number as the support contact in the altered PAD file (at least he did in mine) so you can give him a ring to discuss it if you wish.
Sent you a private email Mike
He's now posted a apology on his sites.
Such behaviour is strange for me. Good luck to you, guys! Nice you dont leave it and kinda try to fight back.
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