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I came across a very cool plugin for Firefox and IE called SiteAdvisor. It basically adds a little icon to your toolbar that labels a site green (Safe), yellow (potentially unsafe) or Red (Unsafe) based on their tests. I installed this and it seems pretty accurate, however when I came here to BBB, it showed the site listed as yellow!
Here is their site info for us – http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/bigblueball.com?safe
They claim a file named “dotmacregister.zip” has potential spyware and seems to be the cause of our yellow flag. I thought Jeff might want to check this out. I found the file in question on our downloads page – https://bigblueball.com/forums/local_links.php?catid=2 and perhaps we should remove it? Can anyone verify it’s adware-free?You can try out the plugin yourself at http://www.siteadvisor.com – it also adds safety icons next to search results for easy safe surfing – its great for those of us who have family or friends who have trouble deciding which sites to give emails to or even safely browse into. I just hate to have anyone not give BBB a chance because of this strange flag!
I went ahead and posted a review for this site giving it a green. So at least if someone checks out details they can see that people think it’s a good site! Doesn’t hurt to try.
The file in question contains an EXE and four Visual Basic 6 files. I think the reason it marked it as unsafe was because the exe was compiled from those project files, and the publisher isn’t recognized by their system, so it markd it as bad.
I’ve added a comment to that download. It appears that only the .exe is actually needed and the rest are just source code files (likely to confuse most AIM users).
I suggest that we edit that zip to excluded the source code files, and expand the description of the download to better explain what it does and why anyone would care.
Jeff, as the website owner, I think you should add a webmaster comment for the site. It may help with the yellow flag.
Did anyone look at what the details say about the zip?
“When we installed and ran dotmacregister.zip, it contacted the following network servers which may may be associated with spyware, adware, or other unwanted programs.” – switch.atdmt.com
It has nothing to do with the source code files, or the binary publisher. Theres no need to remove anything from that archive, a slight modification could be made to the binary to request a user click a button to initially connect, but that’s not really needed.
I’ve hidden the file for now. I did try to leave a webmaster comment, but never received the email confirmation (and I can’t retry for 24 hours). The file isn’t even hosted at BBB.
Dave, did I hear you volunteer to create a “clean” version for us? 🙂
hatedjealousy wrote:I went ahead and posted a review for this site giving it a green. So at least if someone checks out details they can see that people think it’s a good site! Doesn’t hurt to try.GREAT work, V ! 🙂I finally did get a confirmation email from them, and my note is now published on their site. It didn’t come until I contacted them about our “yellow” status. Here was their reply:
Quote:Hello Jeff,We will retest your site’s downloads and rate the site accordingly. We apologize for the delay in our response and we appreciate your bringing this change in your site to our attention. Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions or comments.
Hannah Rosenbaum
Marketing Manager
SiteAdvisor Inc.
direct: 212-404-3126
hannah.rosenbaum@siteadvisor.com
http://www.siteadvisor.comSweet. I love this siteadvisor plugin. It’s really cool. At the moment it is still puts this site in yellow. I wonder how long it takes for them to make the necessary changes.
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