Why the story? Well, here is the reason:

A friend of mine asked me my opinion about a Java framework called Shine which is apparently being advertised and pushed for use in their organization and it's claimed that it's the number 1 ranked project on sourceforge.net and soon will be bought by Apache (a non-profit open source organization with zero money)!!! These are the links he gave me:
http://www.j2sos.org/
http://java2oracle.com/amirsam.htm

So I started from the first link which talks about a project hosted on sourceforge called shine-app. So far so good. Then I checked the number 1 rank claim here and as you can see indeed this project is the number one project among all open source projects hosted on sourceforget.net! There are hundreds of thousands of projects hosted on Sourceforge and indeed being ranked number one is a "huge" accomplishment.

But. There's always a but.

As you can see from the top of the rank page, sf.net follows a rather simple algorithm for calculating the rank number. Basically the more posts to the forum, the higher the rank, the more downloads, the higher the rank, and so on. So I digged depper to find how this project managed to become number one, and it took me only 2 more clicks to find that out. These are the english forums of this project. These are the persian ones. What a huge amount of activity for a project with so little downloads (only 282 vs the number 2 project with 157,123 downloads). Something is suspicious. Let's take a look at the forum postings. This one for example, or this one. PLEASE, click on these links and take a look for yourself. As you can see they have used spamming software to post junk to the forums! First they take a few articles, then they post the whole article and every single one of the sentences of the project as replies to the project!!!! With that they end up with 32,959 posts a day and subsequently become number one on sourceforge!! And they have posted with their real sf.net user accounts. They could've used anonymous and claim they have been target of a spaming conspiracy! Robots are also used for generating loads for the pages of the project (but that's harder to prove because sf.net didn't let me see their access logs), but forum posts are quite enough for coming to the final verdict: the guys behind this project are clearly some charlatans. The whole thing is a circus. It doesn't matter the project source code is good or bad.

And who are they? We know them already from a previous thread in this group: http://java2oracle.com/amirsam.htm and if you waste a few more minutes downloading their software you can see the rest of the gang (if they know they are in a gand?!)

Sourceforge will definitely shut them down because of cheating, but I feel angry that our fellow Iranians engage in such a stupid charlatanism. Even worse: they apparently try to fool others in Iranian organizations and companies to buy their framework because it's ranked one on sourceforge! If cheating is charlatanism, then this is clearly a "crime". You be the jugde yourself....

Ara.