My main point, about the lack of any barriers to entry with adwords, is that it is so quick and easy to get something up and running. If you have an idea, can source the supply, and so many are doing it in partnership– see later– it is only the tec…

And frankly credibility is over-rated. IMO its much better to have people picking your stuff to pieces and jumping on any mistake you make than to be blindly trusted.

This website was a great website to learn about new applications, tricks, etc. The emphasis is on WAS. It no longer has that same meaning to me and I am so utterly ashamed that a person would stoop down to the level that you have gone. I do understand that MacApper is a group of bloggers that may not necessarily speak with each other outside of e-mail, IM, etc., but I believe that every single contributing member of MacApper should be held accountable for ever action that they do and if that action should harm themselves or other that they should take a serious look at the consequences before engaging in that action.

I will not be visiting this website anymore other than to answer any questions.

Just so you are aware, I use MT as my host and it did give me quite a scare and I am seriously considering moving away from them if they were involved with this in any way.

Apology accepted, now let’s move on already.

I’m SO worried about this. This is scary as heck for me no. My life has been so hard lately. My wife (may she rot in hell) is divorcing me and taking the kids. I don’t make a fortune from my blog but it pays the rent on my studio (I had to move out of “our” home – ha ha what a crock) and pays the bills.

If I lose that, I won’t know wear to turn. The bitch is taking everything else I own and her God-dam lawyers lied to the court ,so I have to pay any wage to her. Can you beleive that?

Anyway, my blog is the only source of income they cant find out about. Its kind of a pain having to get the funds paid out to a friend who passes me cash but holy crap; someone please tell me how I can secure WP? Do I need to change hosting or something.

This is too stressfull. I already lost the cars and the dry-cleaning business to that hag.

Worst of all, you have cast a pall upon the good writers who work with you to maintain this site. I nearly took you off my bookmark list out of principle, but I delayed the decision. Today I read two EXCELLENT articles: “ies4osx: Run Internet Explorer 5/6/7 Natively in OS X” and “ies4osx: Run Internet Explorer 5/6/7 Natively in OS X.” The “halo effect” of action was that I paused before doing the downloads suggested in the first article… Could I trust this? Would this be another hoax that could adversely affect my system by downloading malware?

I’ll keep this site on my bookmarks list given the value that it’s writer’s bring to the table. I’ll also make sure I backup my system before downloading anything linked to from this site.

Do you see the impact you’ve had? I hope it will make you think twice before entering any sort of dialog that could lead to a repeat of such a foolish action. I also hope your colleagues will hold you to a higher standard so that their work will not be sullied by your lack of good judgment.

I stopped convulsing when I found out it was a dastardly PR stunt but I am still enraged and my legs only just stopped shaking.

I’m amazed that these so-called bloggers haven’t already been rounded up. Quite clearly, such charlatans and ne’er-do-wells pose a “real and present” danger to national safety and to the business interests of American citizens.

Isn’t this kind of fakery just another form of terrorism?

If you had taken a moment and read the comment directly above your post, in addition to the article, you would have seen that no, my response wasn’t “carefully worded”. As far as any of us knew at that point, we really had been hacked.

In other words: I was already not planning on buying MacHeist 2. But at this point, I’m going to have to think twice about supporting any software publisher that participates in MacHeist.

The bottom line here is: lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas. I sincerely hope that developers that were considering participating in MacHeist will look around them and decide that they don’t want to make their bed in a kennel.

Nothing here really affects anyone else, and while Miles was wrong for saying that it was WordPress’ fault, it’s really not a big deal otherwise

Just think of it as a non-April Fools’ Day, April Fools Day joke

The credibility of the site shouldn’t be determined solely based on a dumb joke

I have to wonder if this itself is a carefully worded statement. It’s true that MacApper didn’t ‘hack’ itsellf or a friends site. It participated in fake attack, and by the tone of it all, had no intention of ever coming clean. Were you desperate for publicity? No. Did you act greedily for publicity and did you act disrespectfully towards your audience for publicity? Let’s let the audience decide.

The thing that ticks me off most about the aftermath of this hoax has been the unapologetic apologies. I’ve heard words like “stupid”, “joke”, “mistake” and “poor judgement” thrown around, as if this were all an accident. I once posted a rebuttal to one of ‘Malcor’s’ seven hundred and forty two word breathless rants about not being an attention [hog]. Someone put effort into that rant. The Malcor hoax took a lot of work, a lot of coordination, a lot of thought and could have yielded a lot of benefits for the MacHeist bottom line had it worked out the way it was supposed to. This wasn’t an accident or a lapse in judgement in the sense that leaving your keys in your car are a lapse in judgement. This was a setting-aside of ethics at best, and a revelation of ethics at worst. Stop calling it a misTAKE and start apologizing for a misDEED, and for goodness sake don’t try to change the topic in mid-paragraph and talk about how excited you are for a new season of deals at MacHeist.

I’m happy to forgive a misdeed, but I’m not keen on this whole “oops, we never expected it to go this far”—where ‘go this far’ is code for ‘get caught’—tone.

I really don’t know what else to say that hasn’t been said already. But from now on, I’ll take Miles’s posts with a grain of salt.

This is not true for me, and in fact it’s the reason why I called out Miles and anyone else involved in our staff forums and asked for the truth. To some of you guys, it may not be a big deal, but as webmaster of a few other sites, it’s important to me to treat readers with respect and clearly lying to them and playing victim doesn’t cut it in my book. The Screw You MalcWhore post was also not necessary and to me was pretty much adding on to the disrespect of our readers.

I also run a small staff at one of these sites and honesty to me is a big issue there as well. I wouldn’t expect people to want to work for me if i lied to them and then followed it up with “he got us” etc.. posts in the forums. I understand the macheist guys wanting to keep it secret but it would violate my ethics and I would not agree to do this if it meant lying to not only my readers, but also staff.

I also went to journalism school and worked in the field for about 6 years and although this may not be a newspaper per se, ethics and journalistic standards are very important to me as a writer in general, and I feel those were both violated and I wouldn’t want my name as a writer affiliated with a stunt like this. So even though I only wrote about 4 posts for macapper and some may think I am overreacting, but those are likely the last you’ll see from me on MacApper. I will however continue reading and encourage all of you to do the same because there is a great group of writers that do awesome work for this site, and I can assure you that they were not aware that this was going on.

@Miles – Thank you for your apology and explaining things for us. I’d stop attempting to defend any of your actions with those who do not know how to respond properly to someone apologizing to them. As for those who have said they will no longer be coming back to this site over this, I am reminded of an ex- of mine that said I would never hear from him again… 9 different times. Point is, those readers, much like my ex- just love to see their own words in print and feel better only when they can attack and make others look bad.

May they choke on their own venom.

People get the attention – and reputation – they deserve.

Very intelligent commentary. I never looked at it in the journalistic manner. It is kind of a double standard.