Rants

This post has been a long time coming … like almost everything on my blog these days 🙂

It’s a rant of sorts and a little over the top, but it sums up what I’ve been thinking for a while.

During 2010, I’ve listened to presentations and read blogs and tweets where people have been talking about other Open Source projects as their rivals. The attitude manifests itself with comments like this:

• “Our CMS really needs to compete with and beat their CMS” or,
• “Our CMS is like wine and theirs is like Mountain Dew”

This has been going on in all directions: between Drupal and Joomla, WordPress and Drupal and also Joomla and WordPress.  

I think this attitude is misguided and here’s why:

Continue reading “10 Reasons Other Open Source Projects Are Not Your Enemy”

We’ve covered Siteground twice before on this blog. The first time I talked with grudging admiration about how they manage to dominate hosting search results by creating fake review sites and putting themselves at #1. Then we looked at how they’d taken over the old Mambo website for self-promotion.

That grudging admiration has gone. The review sites I can understand. Hosting is a dog-eat-dog industry and many companies cross into ethically grey areas to promote themselves. Look no further than one of Siteground’s rival to host the Joomla demo site – Webhostingbuzz has organized a mass-spamming of joomla.org. However, their latest technique crosses the line into fraud:

They are creating and promoting fake awards.

Continue reading “Siteground Creates and Promotes Fake Awards”

Mambo has been dying a slow death since the split from Joomla. In fact, the last time I visited their site was when they were forking again!

Its sad to see a once-great project in such a state. Several links on the homepage are broken, only three users were in the forum compared to over 800 in the Joomla forums and the “Download Mambo” didn’t work.

There are even paid links on their homepage. Scroll to the bottom of Mamboserver.com and you’ll see “CYLON: Internet Marketing, Check out our Customers:” and underneath a list of links including “Phone Card | Used Cars | Geh?use Netzteil USB | Phone Cards | Business Web Hosting”.

Even more shocking was that Siteground, whose antics we’ve covered here before, seem to have taken control of Mamboserver.com.

Continue reading “Does Siteground Control Mambos Website?”

A word of caution about the latest versions of Joomap. They contain hidden advertising with a link back to the developer’s site. Fortunately, there is an easy way to turn if off.

Continue reading “Latest Version of Joomap Has Hidden Advertising”

Why on earth is a major company such as WebProNews.com continually allowed to get away with email spam?

They have a very sneaky way of making people think they’re unsubscribing, while in fact remaining on WebProNews’ mailing lists indefinitely.

Continue reading “WebProNews.com are Major Web Spammers”