Hi all,

My memory is failing me. I'm 99% sure there was a discussion here a while ago about a shareware author releasing two versions of his product, one with protection and one without. It was a study to determine the effect of protection/cracking on shareware sales, I believe.

I thought it was about Winzip, but I can't find any reference to it, and of course googling for related terms brings up a huge amount of rubbish.

I'm hoping someone here knows which bit of software I'm thinking of...

Thanks!

Excuse me while I bump this please, hopefully someone will remember...

Hey Silver,

Timeframe? Remember any posters or keywords?
If I can make a suggestion, grab a copy of the CHM file below and use it for your searches, it seems to come up with better search results than the board search.

K.

Hi K, unfortunately I don't remember any specific details. The one thing I am sure about is that the topic in question was a single post in a longer thread - a kind of on-its-own post that was relevant to the discussion but wasn't the original topic. I've searched the CHM (thanks for the tip) but I still <pause> haven't found <pause> what I'm looking fooooooorrrr.....

The post was discussing how adding protection to shareware doesn't prevent cracked versions being released, and in many cases the addition of protection degrades the user experience for legitimate users. The developer of the software (it's something that's well known, which is why I thought of WinZip) published a web about his experience of releasing two similar versions of his software - one with protection, and one without. The page discussed his findings and noted that he believed he didn't suffer any real increase in pirated usage during the experiment. The post on this forum linked to the web page. I'm pretty certain it was posted by one of the usual suspects among us, and the whole topic had posts from most of the regulars.

Quote:
Originally Posted by disavowed
I ran out of good advice to give about 8 months ago. My only purpose here now is to troll and to force threads off-topic

According to the quote above
I put the search string " I ran out of good advice ".You might find what you want