Download.com sucks

[redink1]

Seth, I really doubt download.com'll fix that link to the trunicated Dink Smallwood file... for free, anyway.

Apparently, the data-entry monkeys who enter information into the download.com databases have become extremely greedy... so now they're charging a LOT of money (http://upload.com.com/1200-21-949840.html?tag=txt) to just list and/or update file listings at download.com.

Yay. Not.

I thought Yahoo was bad, where you had to pay the Yahoo! monkeys $300 a year (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/express/express-01.html) to have the privilege of having your commercial website listed in the crappiest search engine on the Internet. At least non-commercial website listings are free. Download.com is worse. Freeware and other non-commercial products are charged the same as commercial products.

$99 for listing a file within 10 days (maybe, they don't even guarantee it!)
$299 for listing a file in the same day.
$15,000-$30,000 a month to have your files hosted by their servers. Oh, and with this you also get the e-mail addresses of the poor fools who download your files, and they encourage you to spam them.

So now only the big files will be listed at download.com (realplayer, icq, aim, kazaa, etc.) and all of the cool little freeware apps will be gone for good.

Goodbye download.com... I guess I'll just go to tucows from now on.

[MacGyver]

I just found out about this yesterday. I was thinking of putting up a link to one of my games on there, until I found that the deadline is in just a few days, and that it would just be removed by the end of the year anyway. I think this will be really discouraging and disappointing to many freeware and shareware authors, since download.com was one of the largest and well-known places to find software. I've gone there for years, but since it's obvious that the amount of software will significantly drop (aside from just the big people like you mentioned), I guess it's time to find a new download source.