It seems to us that we cannot visit a site related to shareware without coming across an advert for programs that will to one degree or another robotically submit your software to hundreds of sites.

This is of course an attractive proposition. But what lies behind the banner headline? We would weclome discussion of this issue on our forums but we do have the following points to make.

Submission is an error prone process

 sites timeout, object to discrepancies in Pad Files or any number of other problems occur. These issues will occur for robotic submission too and you will ned to spend time examing errors. If you go back to a site where an error has occured without confident knowledge of just how far the automated process got, you may make a multiple submission and annoy the shareware site staff.

Submission is not safely scriptable

You are relying on a software script to fill in web forms without error. At MarsJupiter we know all about this process, we have two shareware products and two freeware examples in our Alex programming language that make a business of parsing web pages and filling in web forms. So if we felt this process could be safely scripted you would see a shareware submission program from us! But the basic fact is that a significant percentage of submissions will fail and thus undermine your chances of a successful manual submission.

Shareware sites do not like robotic submissions

Some sites state that they treat robotic submissions with lower prioity and some may reject them alltogether. Do you really want this happening.

Fully robotic submission is a myth anyway

Some submission engines actually admit that because of the problems with robotic submission they in effect only partially automate the process. So they in effect guide you through manual submission and keep records of author account username and passwords and the submissions made. This may well be useful, but if you have a list of shareware sites of your own, then how valuable is it?

Submission programs promise hundreds of sites?

Shareware sites have been closing rapidly. We have checked through some of these lists of 100's of sites and found only about 30% of them to be working. If these products really do have hundreds of truly worthwhile sites we would be very surprised. Beware of alias's defunct shareware sites are often redirected to live ones!

Paying for manual submission

Some sites offer manual submission as a service, you pay for their staff to submit your software to sites on your behalf.  We can see some potential benefits to this. As with any process if you do it for a living you will develop speed and expertise. But as ever when the process is out of your hands you have to consider the following:

• How much does it cost?
• How much time will we spend checking the results?
• What knowledge would we gain if we did it ourselves?

The best sites or the easiest sites?

With the advent of Pad Files some sites are clearly easier for robotic submission than others. When sites are selected for robot or even manual submission is it on the basis that the sites are the best ones for your shareware or because there is a desire to report the greatest number of submissions?

Conclusion

We would advise people to examine the use of these services, but to do so with a sceptical eye.