Thank you for your interest in submitting software to File Parade. This page
describes our policies regarding submissions and also provides some general tips
for shareware authors. Note that many of our policies are in
response to the enormous amount of spam and other abuses of this system that we have
observed.
Submission Approval
Submissions do not appear publicly on our
website until they have been approved
by an administrator. File Parade reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to
reject any submission, to create a "blacklist" of entities that
do not observe our policies, to design our software to automatically reject all
submissions from blacklisted entities, and to publicly disclose the contents of
our blacklist.
Submission Requirements
File Parade's mission is to list shareware and freeware computer software submitted
by the original authors, and to allow our users to find and access such software. The following
list describes those qualities for which we may reject or blacklist a submission.
- Not software. We reject all submissions for websites, ebooks, or other non-software
products or services. This includes submissions for trivial software that we decide
is intended only to gain links to other products or services.
- Any submission not originating from the author's site, or that includes links that contains
affiliate information intended to earn third-party commissions.
- Dates or titles unnaturally modified to alter a submission's listing order.
- Multiple submissions that are identical or differ only superficially.
- Broken or invalid links. Download links should reference the download file and not go to a
web page.
Screenshot links should reference an image file and not go to a web page, and
should be an image of the running application if at all possible. Application
links should go to a page that is substantially about the software described in
the PAD file. All links should be valid and reference content residing on a
server that is not routinely slow.
- Anonymous submissions where the company name is the same as the product name. We expect
obviously related submissions to come from the same company name.
- Content that is adult-oriented, explicit or otherwise offensive to minors.
- At this time, only English language submissions are accepted.
PAD File Polling
PAD files are re-polled
approximately once a month by our system and so resubmission is
harmless but unnecessary.
If polling fails several consecutive times, the listing will be removed from our catalog.
Normally, we will attempt to contact authors that we are about to remove their
listing due to polling errors. However, File Parade can make no guarantee that such contact
will occur.
When you create a new version of your software, you will benefit by simply
updating the data in your existing PAD file rather than creating a new PAD file
for each version. We will get the updated information the next time we poll your
PAD file, or you can resubmit it with the same URL to update your listing
immediately. Listings on our site may have a download count, affiliate status,
and links from various search engines. You lose all that if the old listing is
deleted. Furthermore, users could stumble upon your old version if we failed to
delete it. Finally, it's very difficult to ensure you submit the new PAD file to
every place that listed the old one. This is why it is much better to use the
same PAD file for all versions of your software.
If, while
re-polling, our system finds that the PAD URL field has changed, the listing will
be updated and future polling will use the new URL.
Communication
File Parade may sometimes contact authors of software listed on the File Parade
website regarding the status of their software, promotional opportunities, or other
related issues. If authors do not wish to be contacted by File Parade, they
should have any software listed on our site removed using the procedure
described in the next section.
Listing Removal
We only want to list software
on our site that the authors want listed. If you do not want
your software listed on File Parade, please do not submit it. To remove an existing listing, please
contact us and be sure to provide your complete PAD URL of all listings to
be removed and the reason for the request. Note that we may take steps to confirm that the
request is coming from the real author of the software in question.
Agreement of Terms
All software listed on File Parade is subject to our policies. Any author who does not agree to
our policies or simply does not want us to list their software can remove it
using the procedure described above.