My final comment on Danny’s blog.
Danny, I must say I'm disappointed in your cynicism in continuing to host the ad in the light of the information I provided. As someone who spends a lot of time helping people remove spyware, I can tell any readers of your blog that SpywareBot is a worthless product. Purchasers of the program seem to agree:'There’s one thing about their program that’s absolutely not clean, and that’s the name. And speaking about quality, why do you think do we get a hundred times as much requests for refund for SpywareBot as we do receive for Spybot-S&D?
Wait… what did I just say? Yes, that’s right, we receive requests for refunds for that application. Simple because many people do mistake it to be our software - then we have to tell them they got cheated. And just those who mistook it are a huge multiple of those complaining about our real product. So if even the small number of refund requests that reach us instead of them is way larger than those about our software, that imho tells a lot about its quality.
So we’ve got a product name that’s intentionally violating our trademark and more important, fooling people, both by pretending to be something else, and pretending to be free when they actually charge the credit card! Detecting it as a threat is not an “angry reaction”, but an attempt to prevent at least a few people to be cheated into paying, or if they did, letting them know so they can get their money back. And again, the numbers seem to confirm that this is very very necessary.’
http://forums.spybot.info/showpost.php?p=61643&postcount=19
Customers of the product you’re selling are complaining in their hundreds, but not to the company which sells the product, but to the company which sells the product they thought they bought.
As somebody who raised concerns about Adblock defrauding web masters of revenue, I’d hoped you would be equally concerned about dubious adverts defrauding customers and legitimate companies alike.
But it seems you are perfectly happy to profit from the ad you host whoever might suffer from actually buying the product.
This is hypocrisy.
Danny’s reply:
Nag, nag, nag
I only bothered to post these comments on his blog because I noticed he’d called Adblock users ‘idiots’ and ‘morons’. I’d obviously formed a rather negative impression of the man previously, as well as developing a certain hostility (See previous posts ;D) and Danny’s dismissal of the issues I raised just confirmed my thinking.
As I made personal contact with the man, I won’t repeat what I said previously, even though Danny did not do me the courtesy of remaining civil (“Sounds to me you’re simply looking for something to whine about, and can’t find anything legitimate,”) but I certainly don’t retract those comments.
Meanwhile, I found a site with a much more rational approach to the issue:
The AdBlock.org Webmaster PledgeThe display of the “Don’t Block my Ads” graphic on my website, indicates my pledge to display only tasteful and passive advertisements on my website. You can visit my website with the assurance that you will not see flashing, jittering, and distracting, advertisements.</blockquote>http://www.adblock.org/2004/09/adblock_webmaster_pledge/
Mind you, I think they also need to pledge not to show dishonest ads like the SpywareBot ad.