28
Nov
Not particularly amused.
Category: News
The buzz about Mac-websites being hacked (which didn’t even amount to that much buzz after all) was just yet another staged event by MacHeist. Honestly, I’ve never participated in MacHeist, as their ‘mission to support indie developers’ seems a bit off; it amounts to selling ‘promo bundles’ of which most of the revenue goes to the MH guys themselves. I find hype-machines fun if the end product doens’t turn out to be hot air, and if it actually supports people I like.
Gus has pointed it out before, but this really put the nail in the coffin for me. MacHeist is absolutely dead to me. That really left me with a very foul taste in my mouth. The websites that were ‘hacked’ weren’t in my feed-reader, and I now know why.
Well said, I completely agree.
Same goes for me, the thingy about the feed reader.
As for MacHeist, I never liked enigmas, but their site was well-designed. And I liked Disco. And Adam Betts.
I never liked Phill’s way of marketing. Hes way is sound fun, but in the real world it will make other peoples loose money. Just my opinion based on the news.
I work as a developer but also for one of the sites that was hacked (macapper.com), we had a great community and lots going for us.
(This might sound a little contrived) no-one except Miles (owner) knew anything about this. We all went on the forums etc saying how ridiculous it was that this could be seen as a PR stunt. Miles then went on to blame the wordpress install – which of course then resulted in mass panic with wordpress programmers trying to fix flaws that wernt there. Total shambles, and a lot of time wasted needlessly by people giving their free time to help with a great platform.
A number of our staff have left, we have received very angry emails from readers and we have ex-readers getting in touch with advertisers trying to get them to pull their ads from the site.
What angers me the most, however, was that this could have been ok. Say they took down MacApper and replaced it with a big “coming soon” or something with the Macheist logo, it could have been quite fun. But going out and insulting our reader-base (I dont know whether you saw the “hacked pages”), was just plain dumb.
It sounds a little dramatic to say that I feel “betrayed”, but this was just a stupid way to loose a lot of readers.
It’s very nice to hear of someone so much closer to it than I am, Danny. I’ve heard similar thing on Macthemes, like Glenn saying that “he wasn’t sure, but to be on the safe side” [he] “suggests that all passwords are changed”. As you point out, it’s only the incredibly stupid way of handling this that really put the nail in the proverbial coffin.
Believe me, you don’t want to be much closer on this one! :p
My first post after the admission has been up for a while now and I have to say that some people are just being ridiculous (taking staff out of the equation now).
I dont want to plug too much, but a “reader” left this as a comment:
“This site is a total sham. I expect you were given a few licenses or some $$$ for a good review? Seriously, who would want their software posted here after the whole malcor thing.”
Now Ive had a long comment about how I feel that the boss men were complete idiots but some people can just take things a little bit too far. I mean, I dont like my journalistic integrity being questioned at the best of times but just because someone higher up the chain made a mistake?! Come on people!
At this point Im fairly sure the question of “fanboism” could be raised but Il try and avoid that one!
Sorry, to hijack the thread a bit :-)