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Well, for the second time in nearly as many years, it would appear that FreewareBB is still hanging on in there and the site has now been offered a new home by the owner of http://www.lo4d.com, another download site which shares the same ideals as us here at FreewareBB.

 

The site owner, Christopher, very kindly offered to host our site because of the difficulties we were having.   Initially, I felt our current host wasn't able to host our site comfortably and that spikes in traffic were resulting in lost visitors and a bad experience for regular visitors and despite many support requests to our host it seemed they still didn't manage to get to the bottom of what was going on.

 

This, I believe, led to the loss of revenue that was needed to pay for the monthly hosting which put us in a vicious circle ... I had to pay for the hosting from my own pocket, but with less and less people coming to the site (or able to get to the site), barely any revenue and frequent issues with the server I decided it was not possible to watch FreewareBB die slowly and made the decision to close.   Searching for another host was possible, but my past experiences tell me that for the amount I was able to pay each month, I would be looking at similar, substandard, hosting.

 

Christopher then came along and offered his help and now I'm thinking, let's give it another shot, let's see if a decent server and host makes the difference to FreewareBB and everyone finally manages to get to the site without any issues and it remains as fast as it should have always been !!.

 

So, for the next few months, and with Christopher's help, I hope we see an improvement in the visitor numbers to FreewareBB once again - thereafter I'll review the situation and see what position we are in so for now we're still alive and kicking - feels good again 

Marko

Just thought I'd share this video with you all ... it shows off the beautiful side of my Country, it's aspiring to watch the many magnificent and breath taking views captured in this slideshow, and do feel free to post your own video of your own country if one is available     

 

In light of the recent spam and hack attempts on FreewareBB, we are now changing the way membership works on FreewareBB.   Anyone in the members group will now be moderated and will also have restrictions placed on their account in relation to not being able to edit their profiles or add a signature to their account.    Firstly, by moderating everyone in this way, it means no spam will get on the site and anyone who attempts to spam us will face an instant ban before anyone even get's to see their post!.   Secondly, by disallowing members edit access to their profiles, this means they cannot place spam links in there and the same applies to their signatures throughout the board!.

 

We now have a "verified member" group with unmoderated access, which is allowed to add signatures and edit their profiles.   Additionally, all advertisements are removed from the view of those in the "verified member" group.

 

What about existing members?

Well, this is the unfortunate situation.   We have over 4,000 members on the site, all of who previously had the ability to post spam links in their profiles and cost us even more rep on the search engines, so essentially, we've moved everyone back into the "members" group and those who wish to continue participating and posting on the site unmoderated, will have to go through the verification process by subscribing to become a Verified Member.

 

We hope the many genuine and trustworthy members will join us once again after verification.

 

Kind Regards

Marko & The FreewareBB Team

You must be a registered member to add files to FreewareBB: REGISTER HERE.

Please make sure you read the rules of adding a download to our site before continuing (can be found at the bottom of this post).

Here's the quick-start way of adding a download to our site manually:
1. From the complete category view of the download section HERE, navigate to the most appropriate category and sub-category for your submission,
2. Hit the "Upload File" button,
3. Enter the details of your freeware (i.e. Title, description, direct link to the download, screenshot, etc),
4. Note that you can enter a link to your own site for the download and screenshot or if your file is around 10Mb or less you can upload it to our servers; you can also enter or upload more than one download location (mirrors, etc) as well as offer more than one screenshot,
5. Once done, hit the "Add Submission" button at the bottom of thepage and your freeware will be checked by a member of staff before being approved.

If you are the developer of any freeware we currently list here on FreewareBB and wish to claim ownership and editing rights, please see THIS TOPIC for more info on how to do that.

PLEASE ALWAYS ATTEMPT TO USE DIRECT LINKS TO FILES IN YOUR SUBMISSIONS (i.e. www.somesite.com/somefile.zip)

We can alternatively host your file for you free of charge if you are unable to provide a direct link or your file is too big to be uploaded to the site, and in this case please contact me once you have registered.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING RULES BEFORE SUBMITTING
1. DUPLICATES: Please search for your software on our site before submitting it - if you find it, contact a member of staff and we can transfer ownership. Duplicate submissions will be deleted.
2. TRIAL SOFTWARE: If you are submitting a trial version which can be considered as freeware (i.e. has limited functions after the trial) YOU MUST include those details in your listing, and specify what the free version will continue to do. If you do not we will delete your software immediately and mark your software as unorthodox in our forums. Please don't try it, we do check!.
3. YOUR WEBSITE: Please make sure your website is not listed in WOT and SiteAdvisor negatively, if it is, it's unlikely we will accept your submission. Your beef should be with those site advisories, not us.
4. VIRUSES & COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE: If you attempt to submit spam, virused files or commercial software to our site, we will delete your software immediately and mark your software as unorthodox in our forums and ban you from the site - your choice !!. If your software is known to have a false positive, make a note of these in the Special Notes section and please try and include even a short explanation to help the members.
5. CONTENT: Both the content of your software and your website will be checked - FreewareBB is a family friendly site and as such your software or site should not make reference to adult content or otherwise inappropriate material not suitable for all ages.
6. MISLEADING SOFTWARE, "FREE DOWNLOADS" AND GENERAL BUGGERY: FreewareBB pride's itself on offering the most genuine, safe and trustworthy software on the net. We check, double check, report, ban and highlight those developers who attempt to trick us and our users. Your software and website should clearly indicate your software is free, with no tricky descriptions or "buy now" nonsense unless you provide clear descriptions on what's free and what's not - if you don't, we could interpret your software as misleading and will ban you, highlight your software in our forums and if relevant, rate you accordingly on WOT and SiteAdvisor - you have been warned!!

You succeeded before and I know you are trying your hardest to get through our defences, but unfortunately you will not succeed this time because we are wiser and smarter and a lot more vigilant than we were before.

 

The amount of spam registrations which we've seen over the past few weeks has been staggering, and thanks to the measures we put in place, these registrations now automatically get filtered and marked as spam registrations which are auto banned.   Those idiots who do get through are then met with the "validation" email system which means to post live on our site, without moderation, they have to pay $1 otherwise their post's are moderated.   If a spammer does make it through and manages to post, their unapproved post is simply deleted and they are banned from the site and marked as spammers which then goes to a central database which is shared with other forums all across the world which means the next time they register on another forum, they are automatically marked as spammers and banned from that site too !!!.

 

As we would say here in Scotland, NAE LUCK !! LOL

Here here!

 

I will now quote the pride of Australia, Men at Work:

 

"Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover."

 

 

Or perhaps I shall quote Lord Byron:

 

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.  The evening beam that smiles the clouds away and tints tomorrow with a prophetic ray.

 

Those who will not reason are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not are slaves.

 

 

HERE HERE!

 

10) You are probably going to send this to see who else falls for it.

I watched a discussion this morning on a popular UK daytime show, aptly named "This Morning" in fact and it started with the headlines that a four year old had to be treated for an addiction to iPads and went on to discuss how some parents are allowing their children online at the age of only 3.

 

The discussion then went on to the findings of a survey carried out by netmums.com who revealed some rather disturbing trends amongst both parents and children.   In total, 1100 parents took park in the survey, as did 825 children who ranged from age 7 to 16.  Here's the results ...

 

Around a third of the children who took part in the survey (35%) agreed that children should spend no more than about an hour online each day and 72% agreed on no more than 2 hours, however 1 in 5 believed they spent more time online than in the real world, 11% admitted to gaining weight through spending more time online than physical activities and 1/3 say they find it harder to focus on "offline" activities like reading a book.

 

35% say they can feel angry or grumpy if they can't get online and 22% said they felt grumpy when they turned off their devices.   Worryingly, half of the children surveyed said they go online because they can't think of anything else to do.

 

64% of the children surveyed admitted they have already had a negative experience onlilne, but only 22% of the parents were aware their children had such an experience!.

 

57% of the kids surveyed said they had accidentally accessed inappropriate material online, whilst 9% admitted to deliberately accessing such.   Animal cruelty was the most commonly accessed material by accident.  

 

24% had accessed eating disorder sites, 20% had looked at self-harm images, 6% violent porn, 18% soft porn, 11% suicide sites and child abuse images, and whilst 77% of those children surveys said they hadn't acted on anything they had seen, over 17% said they had thought about trying it!.

 

From those who did copy what they saw online, 6% restricted their eating, over 3% self harmed and over 3% considered or tried to comit suicide.

 

Now, there will always be the potential to rubbish statistics, but I personally know of parents who don't give a shit about what their kids do online, I've even lived beside a family who's 15 year old boy was arrested and questioned about material he was posting online (highly offensive and disturbing material basically) so I know this crap goes on, Facebook is by far the worst culprit for offensive material, discussion, images and bullying and whilst I could not stand by and watch the internet be "policed" as such, it's obvious our countries have to start tackling the modern day issue's which the net is enabling - our generation have experienced the web and technology as a new thing, our kids are experiencing it as a way of life, will our grandkids and their kids be so tuned in to accessing bad stuff on the net it will simply become the norm and what damage is this doing to our kids?.   They are spending more and more of their time in front of computers or on mobiles than interacting in the real world.

 

Many parents are not interested in what their kids do online, some have never used the internet at home but have installed it for their kids, some have even removed the filters and restrictions safeguarding their kids because it's easier than having to double check a site when it flag's up as inappropriate.

 

I don't have all the answers, but if you are a parent and you believe your kids haven't accessed or seen anything inappropriate online, then you are either totally misguided, in denial or have a fail-safe internet filter which you administer regularly.   If you do, you're most likely one of the very few, and if you don't, then we will have parents like you to thank for what the next generation evolves into through their antics online.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has just recently been approved by the US House of Representatives.

 

This doesn't mean it's law just yet, but it's certainly a step closer to becoming such - as for the next stages of the Act, even I'm unsure about it, but I believe in the US "The Senate" has to pass it before it can be enforced or come into force.

 

So, what exactly is CISPA and why all the fuss?.   Well, even I wondered what the fuss was about, until I actually delved into the fine details of the Act ... here's Electronic Frontier Foundation's, Mark Jaycox, explaining some of the consequences of cispa ...

 

 

Essentially, this means any company in the US could monitor you online, and if they think the government should know about something they can pass on your details and activities and all the while you'll know absolutely nothing about the situation and in reality, you'll never know any information about you was passed to the government or monitored.   Basically, it would appear you can just be randomly monitored and although I'm certain there will most likely be a "protocol" drawn up stating that individuals should only really be monitored if there are grounds to do so, Cispa potentially makes it impossible for anyone to be prosecuted for sifting through your data or monitoring your actions randomly!.

 

It would appear that if this bill get's through, gone are the days of "due cause" or "suspicion" and then "investigation" but it will more likely turn into "investigation" and then "due cause" or "suspicion"       

Well, that past couple of weeks have allowed me to re-evaluate things and fortunately I've been able to come to the conclusion that I categorically do not need, or want Windows 8, as a matter of fact it's actually a worse scenario than I thought because I've read and re-read multiple reviews across the net and it's virtually unanimous that Windows 8 is the rip-off of the century, it's essentially as I suspected, Windows 7 in a nice shiny new "Windows 8" box.

 

I fired up Windows 8 a few weeks back and have been using it since as a dual boot set-up with my Windows 7, and whilst I would definitely say getting used to the Metro interface isn't quiet as bad as you would expect, it's still a feature I don't need, I don't want and all I asked was for the option to revert away from it, not be forced to use it, give me back the start menu and allow others to have the "option" of the Metro interface.    Why is that so hard, and why is it too much to ask?.

 

I couldn't substantiate claims that Windows 8 is faster than Windows 7 either, but the first thing you notice on firing up Windows 8 is the absence of the Aero facility and the all singing, all dancing themes we became familiar with in W7, so without that massive drain on your resources alone, it's pretty much a given that your machine is going to thank you a little in the form of better performance, and for most reviews I've seen elsewhere most are talking about a fresh install, rather than a clumsy update!.   Well, if I performed a fresh install of Windows 7, disabled all the pointless services and got rid of Aero, my machine would (and does) run equally as fast as Windows 8.   I timed it 5 times, and although Windows 8 did appear to have the advantage over boot times, after waiting a few minutes and performing various tasks on the computer (i.e. open multiple tabs on IE, chrome and firefox, download a hefty file, watch a video, etc), it appeared my currently installation of Windows 7 actually out-performed my two week old install of Windows 8?!.   Not, by anyone's standards, conclusive proof, but in fact, proof enough for me that Windows 8 is continuing to disappoint me enough to not want to have to upgrade when the time comes.   Maybe something will change when that time comes, maybe 8 will improve significantly, who knows?,

 

At that same time as dual booting Windows 8, I installed Ubuntu on an ageing machine I had kicking around in the attic, and apart from the dissimilar feel of Windows (duh) I actually managed to use it without any issue's at all - I mean, the most I was doing was browsing the web because I hold virtually nothing on my machines any longer, it's all held on a network drive so I could literally use anyone's machine to perform my day to day activities, so I ask myself when the time comes and I have to leave the Windows I currently enjoy (W7) do I have an alternative or, like others, will I be forced to make the change - well, I actually have endless options because virtually all distro's of Linux could be used to perform my day to day functions, and my first experiences of "wine" were painless, positive and performed better than even I could have expected.

 

At the expense of repeating myself, I'll say it again, Windows 8 is the abandonment of the desktop as we know it by Microsoft, whether or not their argument makes perfect business sense remains to be seen, personally I don't think it does, because MS made a far greater sum of money at one point from the businesses it sold licenses to and I only hope MS live to regret the decision of turning off us desktop users overnight in favour of chasing the mobile market which, some say, has already peaked and won't have much more room left for a "niche" but it's likely MS are already snuggling up in bed to the likes of Samsung in the hope of pushing their "new" mobile operating system onto their hardware.

 

No matter what way you look at it, most of us have been shafted by MS with Windows 8, whether you like the OS or not ... you may like Windows 8 but it's more likely sheer luck you do, MS didn't have you, or your desktop in mind when they created, what is essentially, the front-end for W7 and called it "Metro", instead they had the mobile market firmly in sight!!.  You may, like me, hate Windows 8 and so MS have potentially opened you up to a whole new world of pain if you have to go to Linux and can't get used to it.    If you feel justified spending another £100 on W8, then fair enough, it's your choice at the end of the day, but I'm asking myself where do we go from here?.   What's next?.   Do I really want to entrust my OS and desktop to a company that want to charge me over £100 for an interface called Metro? .... I think not 

Wow, a short post from FS, will wonders ever cease ??  LOL. Seriously FS, I share your opinion.

This reminds me of a true story which happened here in Australia. A man was sunbathing on a remote beach when a small plane flew overhead. The plane kept circling around getting lower and lower. The man finally jumped up and wrote a message in the sand, in great big letters... "BOY"

 

A few minutes later and the plane flew past again, even lower, and out the back a written message furled... "GIRL".

Tom Mullica

 

Just thought I'd share a couple of photo's that my daughter took, little effort was put into it apparently and they were taken by her iPhone camera but based on these photo's we're trying to encourage her now to go on to college to learn more about photography and possibly pursue it as a career !! ....

 

(Oh, and yes, both the cat and dog belong to us )

 

 

One pound for verification a scam??? LOL. Some mothers do have 'em!

 

One pound sounds more link a 'get poor quick' scheme to me than any sort of 'get rich quick' scheme. And they don't have to pay even that paltry sum to avail themselves of FreewareBB's safe downloads.

 

Goodness me, some people just live (and love) to complain.

Apparently, according to a few emails I've received we should be ashamed of ourselves for introducing a "verified membership" programme and it's nothing short of a "scam" with one member claiming we may even then "sell" the verified member list to make more money perhaps.
 
Let me make one thing perfectly clear to all those who think the verified membership scheme is a get rich quick scheme or a scam, so far we have 14 people in the verified member group which has generated something like £5.50 because PayPal automatically take nearly half the amount and before it's converted into a currency that's of any use to me, I've lost even more.   I do not anticipate many more people subscribing either as my intention isn't to charge people to use this site, which most are actually forgetting, everyone can use this site to download freeware in exactly the same way they were doing before, it's only when someone want's to post in our forums or have access to change their profiles are they required to subscribe to the "verified membership" programme and we do it yearly to make sure verification remains current.    We had only a handful of people posting on the site previously anyway, so those people who have verified are people who realise I've done this for the best of the site, and certainly not for gain.
 
Again, we've also been accused of running an "insecure" version of IPB which is why the spam attack took place, but the reason it happened is because we had many many registrations over the past year, a lot of which were spam registrations which lay dormant for a while and we would have no way to identify spam registrations against genuine ones, then all of a sudden, those dormant spam registrations then started populating their profiles with harmful and spam URL's which most members wouldn't see or know about but which the search engines (google in particular) managed to pick up through spidering our website - many new registrations were made at the same time and spam URL links placed in the profiles.  
 
These accusations are quite obviously from people who know or care little about what goes on behind the scenes of a website like ours and are from people who wouldn't normally be affected by the "verified membership" scheme because they have never posted or contributed to the site in any way, yet feel they have the right to complain when, for the past 5 years, I have sweated blood and paid considerable amounts of money from my own pocket to keep the site afloat, so to those people I say go and take a massive run and jump across to download.com, tucows or any of the other massive download sites who will gladly cram as much adware into their installers as your bandwidth can handle and will recommend a download especially for you as long as the developer has paid enough money - if you don't like them, try any one of the other many thousands of spam download sites around which will give you more crapware, trialware and shareware than you can handle, not to mention and endless supply of popups and in-your-face- adverts - if you don't like the fact that you can download from us for nothing yet have to pay $1 per year to post or change your profile which virtually eliminates spammers from our site, here's an idea ... go to the likes of download.com or tucows.com which will never have negative ratings by any of the site advisories, despite the fact they both have contained some of the nastiest bugs, malware and viruses to be seen on the net and wrap their installers in masses of adware - it's only the small guys like us (who are genuinely passionate about what we do, pride over profit) who will be penalised by the search engines and site advisories when one thing goes wrong because we're not generating millions of dollars in advertising revenue!.

Hello all...count me in!  Just glad you are still with us marko.

 

Hideous predators these hackers.  I am really sorry this happened, but FBB will always be the best deal on the net.

 

Thanks again for hanging in there marko.  This kind of thing is the worst kind of pathetic misdeed.

 

Best to all this holiday season.  Hope all is going well for you all as we close in on Santa day and the new year.  I'm tingling already, hoping I've been a good boy!

 

I think it's a brilliant concept, simply because it just hits the spammers right on the head with a minimum of effort. Spammers and spamming are the bane of site admin, I know that over at DCT it is nigh on a full time job trying to keep the scumbags at bay. It is nothing to have to fend off up to 2 and 3 hundred spamming attempts per day.

 

IMO, it wouldn't hurt to make nominal fees a compulsory part of membership/registration on ALL sites. Users would still be able to visit and browse around sites for free but the ability to post comments and interact generally would be barred until registration and payment of a nominal fee were completed.

 

If all site owners complied, this one simple act would put a severe dent in the massive spam problem. It would also make users more discerning about which sites they choose to register for, disadvantaging all the shoddy sites out there and allowing the cream to rise to the top.

OK guys, let me just stop for a second and attempt to put what I'm thinking into a better way of words - firstly, I just about agree with everything that has been said in regards to those arguments against the likes of SOPA, Google and the "war on piracy" and from previous post's anyone can see my stand on the matter but I too am becoming a little frustrated, possibly as a webmaster, when my efforts online are shadowed by the hundreds of thousands of sites which do nothing more than share links of commercial software and generate a great deal more admiration and respect in doing so whilst this time last year I had all but given up on FreewareBB because it appeared nobody was interested in downloading freeware from us.

Luckily, things have picked up and the hours per day I, and others, put into the site have began paying off ... the fact people can download commercial software, free of charge, on warez sites certainly doesn't help the likes of us freeware sites attempting to show a better way forward for the masses, and FreewareBB in particular, a cleaner and safer way.   So, you'll have to excuse me when I show no sympathy for the likes of Kim.Com who has made his fortune through many illicit practices at the expense of legitimate sites and has put many smaller independent software houses out of business by allowing pirates to host their software on his servers.   In fairness, there are still many more similar services doing much the same at present such as rapidshare, fileserve, filesonic, bitshare, to name few - although I think the message is slowly beginning to filter through to these people that it could only be a matter of time before they too find themselves on the receiving end of SWAT through windows, LOL!.

As for Google doing what they are doing, who are they affecting? Those looking to download pirate software!?.   Sure, the implications are such that if they do this, they can do anything else too but the truth is (as I've said before) they will and have to adjust SERP's constantly to avoid their search engine being manipulated by other webmasters who constantly find new ways to blackhat their sites further up the search engine results pages, so there really isn't anything new in what Google are doing here, they've just came out and told us they are making this move in particular - they have made many more adjustments in the past and will continue to make many more adjustments in the future to avoid those people who shouldn't be given first page rankings being there.   We can all debate on whether or not Google should be doing this, and what gives them the right to do it, but I think the proof is in the pudding so to speak, Google don't really do a bad job of keeping things relevant, so they must be doing something right - if they left things alone only those sites that were savvy or able enough to manipulate the search engine algorithms would be on the first page of any results.

As for the media giants claiming they loose billions per year, again, as I've said before, this isn't the truth because although a typical household could download 10 films per week at a usual cost of £15 or so, if the avenue for them to do this was removed, they wouldn't go out and buy 10 films per week, so yes, there is an element of skulduggery to what the media companies are claiming and if I'm honest I couldn't care less about those companies anyway, they are of a size that they can withstand this kind of "loss" but it's the smaller, independent companies who's software is pirated or the smaller independent film makers who loose out at the cinema's that I feel sorry for.   Those, and genuine websites like ours who don't and can't get the recognition they deserve because other, illegal activities constantly shadow their efforts, so again you'll have to excuse me if I show no sympathy towards those sites who are removed from prominent positions in the search engines and are replaced by much more genuine, legitimate and hard working sites.

Both these media giants and those operating pirate sites deserve a hammering, there is no middle ground with any of them as far as I can see but as long as pirate sites exist, the giants will only continue to push through illegitimate requests to governments and we'll see an end to the internet as we know it - and in amongst the struggle, many more of the smaller sites like ours will be caught in the crossfire of it all as we could then be told to remove certain content or face prosecution or fines.

I'm not entirely sure who is kidding who in this entire debate, whether it's the media giants kidding the governments as to the scale of the issue, the government kidding us all on about the laws they "have" to introduce to gain a greater grip of the "issue", or the average Joe who claims if the price wasn't too high they would buy the media legitimately.   There are good and bad arguments on all sides, but there are that many flaw's in all of them that it's becoming silly - for me there isn't going to be one single answer to the problem because as long as the media giants continue to push for legislation, the governments continue to force laws through and the average Joe continues to download illegal material, everyone is shoving in their own direction for their own purposes using whatever arguments they can, and the ultimate outcome will be an internet war where everyone suffers - by that time, it will be too late and the damage will be done - the internet as we know it will be gone forever, and who will we blame?.   The media giants for attempting to stop people downloading their films illegally in the name of greed?  The government for attempting to stifle our freedom on the internet because of their greed?  Or the average Joe who downloaded multiple films, MP3's and software because of their greed?.   (answers on a postcard please)