The following article is Re-posted in it’s entirety with permission from Sunbelt W2KNews Electronic Newsletter which is published by Sunbelt Software who is the creator of great software tools like IHateSpam.
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I was surprised to learn that a few websites that position themselves as independent resource & review sites, are really a hidden marketing vehicle for one of the players in our tools market.
First of all, let me start with a full disclosure. We try to make sure everyone knows that W2Knews is published by Sunbelt Software as a service to the NT/2000 system admin community. We write about the market, events and the tools we sell. We are open about it. Sunbelt also publishes WinXPNews, which is for consumers running WinXP. The ads in there often are “house ads” that refer people back to the Sunbelt OnLine Shop. Sunbelt has always been above board with its marketing. So far so good.
Now, how about some other sites? Are they as overt about their marketing? Some apparently are not. I got a bit suspicious, as I tried to place an ad for iHateSpam Server in the msexchange.org site. Our emails were never answered, but the products of a competitor of iHateSpam Server were prominently and consistently featured.
Then I started to do some research on this site, simply by googling it. Turns out it is run by a gentleman by the name of Stephen Chetcuti out of Malta. Now, Malta is not your ‘next door’ and logical location for a site or a site operator like that, (the island of Malta is south of Italy):
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031117TB-Malta
Moreover, he seems to be very active and runs several sites, that link back to each other often. Here they are:
www.ISAserver.org – Positioned as:
“The #1 unofficial ISA Server resource site”
www.msexchange.org – their banner states:
MSExchange.org is in no way affiliated with Microsoft Corp.
www.serverfiles.com– Presents itself as a Server software directory for Network administrators & IT professionals, and rates products by “votes”. Products of one specific vendor are very often #1.
www.windowsecurity.com – I quote: “WindowSecurity.com provides Windows security news, articles, tutorials, software listings and reviews for information security professionals covering topics such as firewalls, viruses, intrusion detection and other security topics”. The site features individual authors, but does not make any statements about affiliations.
Turns out all these sites are run by the same organization called ‘isoftmarketing’ that hosts its sites at Rackspace in San Antonio in Texas: I found them here: www.isoftmarketing.com and who is behind all these sites? The same Stephen Chetcuti. Google shows this definitively, put his name in the search box and click through a few pages.
Now, all these sites somehow magically have products from one company advertised, featured, and often voted on as being the leader in their category. The company? Sunbelt’s competitor GFI Software who has their European headquarters in… you may have guessed it by now: Malta. And guess who is on the payroll of GFI Software? The very same Stephen Chetcuti, also from Malta. You can see over here (end of the page) that he also contributes to sites with his GFI credentials:
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031117TB-Chetcuti_GFI
Then we started looking a bit more in detail, and found this article:
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031117TB-Chetcuti_More
A quick search on the author of that article Alex Zammit shows that he’s a GFI employee (search Google groups). So a GFI employee posting articles on that site, but without mentioning where they work…
A bit of surfing on these above sites will show you what I mean. None of these sites have any disclosure of the fact the site owner works for GFI, they just claim that they are sponsored by the advertisers. This may be true, but the content on these sites needs to be filtered with this new knowledge in mind. So, whenever you are on the Net, and browse a site, keep in mind the old expression “consider the source”. Buyer Beware!
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Geek News Central completly agree’s and thought it important that out readers be able to get the perspective from a vendor that is being above the board where as some of his competitiors are what I would call being very scrupulous Buyer Beware!
How would we spam you?? We don’t sell anything nor do we promote the site via e-mail. There is a opt in newsletter thats it. I am confused.
Yeah one time I posted a comment on this “tech” website, geek something something, and then I got spam from them. WTH? Oh wait, that was here. =/
I really think the guy from Sunbelt Software is wasting his time and his breath attempting to shoot down his competitors on message boards (or on his own website) for doing basically the same thing he does. I get both of Sunbelt’s newsletters on account of having downloaded trials of their software. I never opted in for the subscriptions but they are just (barely) interesting enough not to cancel. Almost all the “recommendations” and links in Sunbelt’s newsletters are a blatant pitch to sell their product (or do the same for paid advertisers of which they don’t seem to have very many). I never see the admission included in context with their “recommendation” that ” I Hate Spam” is their product. I never followed the link to find that out because having tried their program I was thoroughly unimpressed and NOT interested. I never even connected the trial download with the appearance of the newsletter in my mailbox. I think their newsletters are nothing more than a brief re-hash of what they’ve read from someone else’s website with all the meat trimmed out — just an excuse to blast you with a pitch for their same old product line week after week. Personally, I would warn anyone whom I might share the newsletter with to stay away from their software. Not that the newsletters are anything to write home about. I find the name of the poster of this article on the about page but not the name of the person who wrote it nor the business relationship between them. Being of average intelligence it seems pretty obvious to me that a piece like this that so blatantly does a fluff job on Sunbelt Software while blasting some other poor shmuck I’ve never heard of is more commercially motivated crap than anything remotely resembling genuine news, sound technical advice, or well-explained detailed reasons to choose one software over another. Maybe you think your average web visitor isn’t intelligent enough to realize when someone is trying to sell him something. Eh? Anyhow, as a salesman you pretty much suck. Thanks anyway. By the way, if you don’t want to invite people to post links to other websites maybe you could save yourself the trouble by not using a URL field in your comments form. Personally I would rather decide for myself what to look at or what not. Of course this is your website and you know what you can do with it. (Bet this won’t take long to get deleted.) And no, I’m not in the software business. Long as we’re making recommendations though, I use Mailwasher for spam control. Have a *#$@^& day. (My Yahoo mail has great spam control features too.)