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June 12, 2007
News site headaches, or MacUpdate sucks sometimes.
So for Perian 1.0 we're working on some screen casts. The guy who was working on the screen casts needed a build of Perian that had the 1.0 version number on it so he could show it with the right number. We set that up for him off of some really skank beta.
Today I got notified by multiple people about Perian 1.0 being out. This was certainly news to me. We had this problem on Adium before, someone would be overzealous and contact the update sites, and then they'd post a link to a beta, and we'd have to get them to pull it.
So I notified MacUpdate. I then found that VersionTracker also had posted it, I notified them as well.
Here's the response from VersionTracker:
Sorry, got an automated email about it's release and I assumed it was from the dev. Sorry for any trouble it caused.-Kurt
I considered that pretty nice.
Here's what I got from MacUpdate:
Chris, We post software that is released to the public. That is our policy, as we clearly state on our bylaws page. i can understand your frustration, but the simple fix is to simply not make releases public if you don't want them public.-Joel Mueller
www.macupdate.com
The problem is, this software wasn't public. The URL was posted nowhere publicly available with the exception of an index that's not publicly available unless you type it by accident. I.E. it's not linked anywhere.
It's not about the fact that it's posted though, it's about the tone that Joel took here. He's been like this for a while, and it's frustrating. He makes advertising money off of people posting updates to their software on his website, and he treats people very, well, rudely.
I'd boycot MacUpdate, but that'd be pointless. Users post updates and if they don't he goes and finds them, or at least that's my impression of it. It's just frustrating.
The worst part is that it would take 2 seconds to verify the download by going to, get this, http://perian.org/.
This is the first time I've had versiontracker post something that wasn't released, and this is not the first time MacUpdate has done it.
Comments
Sorry that happened to you guys.
One item of note... if you did a google search for ~Perian Beta~ it would find your beta.html page. I found it when I saw posts in your project comments about beta releases. I did a search and the page showed up a few down in Google. This was shortly after the 1.0b3 release. It is now the top listing if you do ~perian beta~.
Just thought you should know it got spidered somehow.
By the way... excellent work. Perian is the video playback answer I'd always been looking for on my Mac. Combined with NicePlayer I'm a really happy camper.
Posted by: Dave at June 12, 2007 07:00 PM
Actually it's not pointless to boycott, the referrer will certainly be passed on in the http headers you could redirect people who are trying to download the pre-release from macupdate to this blog post or something to the effect of this post. Although it looks like it is corrected now on macupdate.
It still would probably be a good idea to put some kind of proxy that serves the file in front of the betas such that you could either reactively block out any site linking from the general public and instead serve a page that explains that it was linked to improperly (might make the trackers check better when their users email them instead just one from you) or proactively filter out everything that wasn't referred from google groups (or lacked a referrer altogether as it stands to reason the average user would not being using a client that wouldn't send the referrer). Either would allow the betas to freely available and prevent them from being generally accessible for mass consumption.
Posted by: Jay Tuley at June 12, 2007 09:06 PM
@Dave: That would be fine if it was one of the betas that were semi-public, but this was a url that was pretty private.
Posted by: Chris Forsythe at June 12, 2007 09:09 PM
i downloaded the 1b5 yesterday as Dave. I read a post on a blog, followed the macupdate link....and finally searched for perian 1.0, it was on 4th or 5th place on google. Sorry but didn´t look too much private...but your right, you had a note about not posting it publicly.
I tried it for a while and looked very nice.
Great that now supports subs. Any plans to support wmv on future? i hate flip4mac...
Posted by: nickhell at June 13, 2007 03:54 PM
I feel for you guys. MU did the same to me with Afloat b4, and I had a heated e-mail exchange with them. They do treat you like floor-cleaning rags >_<
To add insult to injury, they also uploaded the DMG to their server, making it impossible to "pull" the release had something gone wrong (which it did -- it killed Intel systems by causing mass crashes, btw).
Ugly, ugly thing.
Posted by: l0ne at June 15, 2007 07:32 AM
MacUpdate is terrible. I used to like the site for the functionality, but as a (somewhat former) developer I've had issues with them which were mostly negligible. What's not negligible is that I signed up for an account a while back with a special email address that I only used with MacUpdate, and now I get literally HUNDREDS of spams to that address a month. Unacceptable violation of their "privacy policy".
Posted by: Robin H-P at July 20, 2007 07:12 PM
They did the same to me. I didn't get the heated email exchange, though -- they simply ignore me. Great site :(
I like the idea of using referrer to bad-mounth them, though :-)
Posted by: Vaclav at February 28, 2008 10:23 AM