Hey, Adobe, who's minding the MXNA?
So I subscribe to MXNA, or AXNA, or whatever it’s being called these days. You know what I’m talking about:
So theoretically, Adobe is supposed to check out these feeds and ensure they are valid feeds, so we have a place to go to get real information from the Flash community. I’ve known people in the early days that were not approved for MXNA because they had too much non-Flash content on their sites, and others get pulled out of there for the same reason. But now it seems like the flood gates are open and anybody who mentions the word Flash on their site is A-OK.
First of all, there are over 2,000 feeds in there at this point, so it’s a bit overwhelming anyway. But I’ve noticed that there are certain sites that… I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but they are fake Flash sites just thrown up there to get traffic for other links. In recent weeks I’ve noticed a flurry of posts from these three sites:
goronaldgo [dot] net
foolsgoldflash [dot] net
flashnetwide [dot] com
Obviously I’m not going to link directly to them, but go check them out. Utter crap content. I mean, check this one out:
goronaldgo [dot] net/?p=128
How to draw a house in Flash. I mean… wtf??? Seriously. In case you don’t want to go there, I have to share this one:
That’s pure gold. I’m LMAO. This is categorized under “Flash Industry News”. And note that you ahve to register to leave comments. Don’t want any real comments coming in.
The other content on all three sites is a mix of AS1, AS2, stuff targetting Flash MX, MX 2004, Flash 8, a bit of AS3 / Flash CS3. I even saw something that used Flash 4 slash-syntax! On one site, half the articles were all posted on the same day. All of this stuff is obviously ripped off from old sites that probably don’t care any more. At least one of the articles I saw looked like it was pieced together from two different tutorials. It had you create a symbol with one id that was never used, and then use attachMovieClip with another id that was never mentioned.
Now if it was just crap content, ok, so what. But strewn throughout the site are these pseudo-articles like this:
This is strewn with links to various gambling sites. The other sites have similar articles with links to Costa Rican vacation sites. I checked out the whois info for all three sites, and they are all registered through godaddy.com via DomainsByProxy.com so you can’t see who really owns them. Wanna bet it’s the same guy?
Anyway, I could care less that this stuff is out there. If they make a buck off it, good for them. I actually admire the fact that they went out and found those house images and put words to them that almost make it seem like a useful article at first glance. My beef is that someone at Adobe is allowing these sites on the aggregator. Anyone who knows Flash could tell in 2 minutes that these sites are fake. Someone is not doing their job.