This article refers to occurences in the year 2000. What's said can't necessarily be applied to current versions of the mentioned sites and persons. Please make up your own mind.
My Fraud Log
Quite some time ago, I was a member of the 'Abandonware Ring'. But I quit it because it became more and more obvious that Swizzle (the webmaster) is only interested in money! He even listed big warez-sites, although he pretended to run a 'clean' ring.
Some month later, the AR's harddisk crashed and as none of the webmasters seemed to have backup copies (how dumb can anyone be?), they uploaded an old version of the site listing again. This included my site. Neither did I join nor did I have their button up! They listed me anyway.
It is a unique element at the AR that members can edit their own listing without one of the webmasters having to approve it. Just for fun I tried it out. And my old login worked!
As hard as I tried I couldn't resist! I changed the number of games and apps to very high numbers. Just enough to make my site the biggest, even bigger than HOTUD! So it was listed with about 1600 games and 250 apps. My hits boosted! From now on, I "added" games and apps twice a day so that I always had the "new"-flag. All my trackers told me almost all of my visitors come from the AR.
Then I noticed that I've been to shy! Nothing really happened, so I decided to increase the numbers of games and apps to ridiculously high ones. Everyone who saw this must have seen that this is nonsense! But the AR didn't react...
I was also a bit irritated that I didn't get angry comments from disappointed visitors referred by the AR. Noone seemed to care that I lied in the listing! Only one guy submitted a comment at the AR. When I was still thinking about how to react, someone called 'Jens' who obviously understood what was going on, answered.
I just continued like before. I still couldn't believe the AR-webmasters didn't notice anything. One quick look at the list would have been enough! Then I read these news:
But nothing happened! Either Swizzle had been too lazy to do the check or he simply didn't care. I went on increasing the numbers...
Then three days after the news post by Swizzle, my site's listing was gone. It wasn't mentioned in the news though. Perhaps Swizzle was afraid people would laugh about him if they knew he had been cheated?
Looking at the other members I noticed B.S:O.D. still being there. Vohaul also wasn't a member and didn't have the AR's button up. So they didn't really 'clean up' but they had just noticed my fraud after more than 10 days!
But they didn't even send me an e-mail or something warning (not even informing) me that I'd be kicked! They just did it. Daily routine it seems.
Conclusions:
1. The AR doesn't give a damn about their members! First they list sites which aren't members (it would only take some minutes to go through the listed sites and check which still display the button!), then I could do what I want with my listing and they let me go on for almost two weeks! The number of games they reacted to was 2999999 - nearly 3 millions!
2. Visitors only look for the number of games in the ring's listings. Without the AR, my hits fell back to the normal level. Well, I don't care how many visitors I get, but it really frightens me that only one number can do so much! I don't understand that! I've always prefered the small sites because the quality is higher in most cases. But most people just want downloads. Sad :(
Now that it's over I'd like to apologize to all the visitors who I 'cheated'. I hope you didn't regret that you found my site this way!
But I won't apologize to the AR and its 'crew' - they only got what they deserved!
