I found this story at the Donation Coder blog and thought that I would pass it on because it is really worth to mention. A software author who submitted his softwares to various download sites before took a closer look at some of them only to find out that some download sites gave awards to every software in their catalog.
He decided to create a bogus executable and submit it to the sites in question to see if they would test the software at all. He named the software ‘awardmestars’ and used the description ‘This program does nothing at all’ and a screenshot with a similar message.
Take a educated guess on how many download sites would still give the software an award ? The total number is 16 ! The software author suspects that this is done to increase the chance that the sites would hope that the software authors would display the award on their sites and add a link back to them.
This is not the end however. The software author decided to aim higher and submit his software to 1033 download sites.
According to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions began “awardmestars� is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the sites that listed the software emailed me that it had won an award (I don’t know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win quite a few more awards yet. Many of the rejections were on the grounds of “The site does not accept products of this genre� (it was listed as a utility) rather than quality grounds.
source: successful software
via: “>Donation Coder
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Beware: Avira Partners With Ask And UniBlue
Cloud Computing World Forum World Awards Shortlist Revealed
Is quite a socking news…
Here is another description of the issue with a bit more detail
http://www.cnet.com/defensive-computing/8301-13554_1-9762604-33.html