This morning I checked my e-mail to find two messages from soft82.com. The first was to tell me the following:
“SoundBoard has been tested by soft82.com team against viruses, spyware, adware, trojan, backdoors and was found to be 100% clean. Our editors will recheck this software periodically to assure that it remains clean.”
They then linked me to their new product page for SoundBoard:
http://www.soft82.com/download/windows/soundboard/
In a separate e-mail, I was informed that SoundBoard “has been given 5 Stars Award by soft82.com editors” and that I should download a copy of their award image to display on my site. Oh, but I can’t link to their copy – I have to host my own local copy. Bandwidth cheapskates can’t even let me link to a 3.25KB image… And even better, judging by the list of available images on their awards page, they don’t even bother with anything other than 5/5 stars.
Anyway, I looked at the page they made for SoundBoard. They basically copy-pasted my description from my own SoundBoard page, minus a few letters (can’t have complete sentences now, can we?), and proudly announced that it’s virus-free. They’re hosting the screenshot image themselves, but they didn’t make it, they just copied mine.
Now, if you were to click “Free Download”, you’ve already incremented their “All Time Downloads” counter, even though you haven’t chosen a mirror yet. Even better, the only mirror they list is my own download URL – they can’t even bother to host a copy of the shareware themselves. It’s like a 100KB file!
Of course, that’s probably a good thing. They linked to the URL that always points to the latest version of the shareware, so even if I release a SoundBoard update today, anyone who downloads SoundBoard through their site will get 2.3 instead of the 2.2 advertised there.
I can’t really complain. It’s free advertising, and free advertising is, after all, free. I just thought it was somewhat amusing. Their site seems a little fishy to me, but as long as they’re linking directly to me for the downloads, I don’t have any problem at all with the situation. I haven’t decided yet whether or not I’m going to put their award image on my site or not…