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.

1. 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.
2. Any submission not originating from the author's site, or that includes links that contains affiliate information intended to earn third-party commissions.
3. Dates or titles unnaturally modified to alter a submission's listing order.
4. Multiple submissions that are identical or differ only superficially.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Content that is adult-oriented, explicit or otherwise offensive to minors.
8. 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.