Automatic 5 Stars - Promote it?

[dxgame]

I'm getting a ton of "your game recieved 5 stars" , from software sites which I'm sure are auto responses intended to get us to link to their site. Does anyone use these 5 star ratings on their site to promote their game?

[cliffski]

Never. Its especially tragic when you suddenly get editors choice awards for 5 games at once.
Its a total waste of time.

[Gilzu]

Never. Its especially tragic when you suddenly get editors choice awards for 5 games at once.
Its a total waste of time.

no no no...

I still get 5 star rating for "Goose Chase" which i stopped publishing 3 years ago - there's no online website anymore, no download, nothing... as if i never published it at all (except from the broken dl links on almost every dl site and the ASP pad repository).

now THATS tagic.

[jeb_]

We've also received a dozen of "five stars" and "editor's choice" etc that we aren't using. The question is, though... does the generic web surfer know that these are automatic if she visits your site and see a long list of five star badges? I find it tempting to put them on the site without actually linking them (ie, just the images).

[Chris Evans]

To be honest, when I was a newbie to the whole Indie/Shareware scene a few years ago I thought those awards were legitimate. It wasn't until I started looking into submitting to download sites myself that I realized those awards were a farce. So actually I think those awards have a somewhat positive affect on the average visitor browsing your page. They don't know any better. I just don't have those awards on my page out of principle. I want to actually earn the awards I display on my page (which would be zero at this point). But I don't really see any harm in putting up those download site awards if you want.

[charlie]

i used one on my site, but only because the guy who runs it bought a copy.

Cheers
Charlie

www.charliesgames.com

[Savant]

It's basically a way for those sites to set up link farms without having them look like link farms. Give everyone 5 stars and they'll link to the shareware site, increasing their page rank.

It's a scam. Ignore them all.