Chris O.

Yes, this site is acutally downloadaccess.net under a different URL. This is a known scam and has been listed on Web Of Trust for potential malicious content, spyware, adware and virus distribution.

www.mywot.com for the WOT browser plug-in, highly recommended.

This is a Chinese wholesale site and to its credit, at least it declares that right from the start, rather than attempting to fool you into believing it has any connection with real top-brand manufacturers.

And it states clearly:

"We sell exclusively from Chinese manufacturers"

So, this site doesn't sell the genuine articles. At least it's honest.

It attempts a little dishonesty in presenting logos from VeriSign and ScanAlert, though. As these don't click through to the respective services as they should, we can assume they're phony. Still, at least it's an easy con to spot.

Lastly, a couple of slip-ups in text suggest that this site is connected to another couple of suspect ones, at KicksOnFire.com and colette.fr. The latter, purporting to be a genuine French fashion site, has to be one of the worst designs I've seen in ages and isn't likely to fool anyone, I hope.

Be careful out there, read the terms and conditions and anything else you can find about a site before you send money. All that glitters is rarely genuine.

I'll give this a MEH for now, in that it doesnt appear to be a scam as such but isn't cool, either. If other reviewers find that it doesn't deliver or breaks its own terms, then a $#@! Will be appropriate.

Another Chinese site, unique in my experience here so far in that it's also still entirely written in Chinese, so it's going to be of no use to most viewers anyway. It also looks very much like 25Outlet.com, another intentionally misleading Chinese site. None of which says "visit me".

A few years back Blue Man Group created a performance piece entitled Exhibit 13, which featured some of the papers that had drifted to the ground close by the twin towers on 9-11 (http://www.exhibit13.com/home.html). This site is in a very similar but less sombre vein, in that it too collects the miscellany of human flotsam found tucked into books, blowing in gutters or otherwise set adrift to puzzle, educate, or just mystify its finders. Whether you find it funny, or sad, relevant to our society in general or just a random selection of trash, depends very much on your own viewpoint.

I was very disappointed that the adult section of the site wasn't fully available to me running my version of FireFox with its assorted extensions. I couldn't see any images at all, so they presumably use javascript or some other clever technique which my browser won't co-operate with. So I can't comment on that side of the site, though I will warn parents that it's there and they may not want to allow their kids access to the parent site given that it links directly to adult material.

You know, I'm beginning to think all these reviews of awful Chinese sites are here just to get their URLs on SiteJabber. Rather sad, really.

Anyway it's not worth gracing this heap of junk (oh... Chinese junk... lol) with a serious review. It's hard to believe anyone could fall for this. Or, having discovered what they should already have figured out, that they have even the slightest hope of getting their money back.

When you first arrive at this site, you'll very likely get the mistaken impression that it's very amateurish. It uses the Simple Machines Forum free bulletin board software, but doesn't really attempt to customize it so that it stands out; the backgrounds are uniformly grey, and you'll miss the navigation bar completely if you're not paying attention. But don't be fooled, this is a great site to visit and contribute to if you're an amateur photographer, especially if you're seeking critiques and you enjoy entering competitions as well.

Members have a "picture of the day" competition which runs constantly, and no special entry is required; any image posted in a gallery is eligible. And although inevitably there can only be one winner each day, a special thread called "cafe crackers" showcases all the other candidates and gives them equal credit and praise. It's a good learning experience.

In addition, images are considered for an "image of the week" award, and very highly praised images can end up becoming "Cafe Choices", with special features about the photographers. On the side, there are occasional other, themed competitions, too.

There are no prizes for winning or being featured in any of the competitions, just the satisfaction of knowing your work is appreciated by your peers.

You may also indicate, when you post images to your personal gallery, that you would like critiques. You needn't be scared to post, people won't critique your shots unless you say that's OK. And most times, when people do offer a critique, they'll be diplomatic. Of course there's no guarantee that you'll like what you read, but that's the point, to learn from others.

And there are some darn good others, here, too. Some really fine quality images, and some photographers who consistently produce an amazing standard of work. If one of these folks offers a critique, it's going to be worth taking note of. And if by chance you find yourself achieving equal status in the photo of the day thread, that's a big confidence booster.

Beyond this, there is an extensive general forum covering other aspects of the hobby including hardware and software matters, camera reviews and other matters that you'd expect to find covered in a site of this nature.

What singles this site out from the many, for me, is the friendliness of it all. It's intended to have the flavor of a cafe experience, and by and large it achieves that very well. People are nice to you from the start, and nobody, even the best of the best photographers there, is at all pretentious. These are people you feel comfy sitting down and sharing a cup of tea with.

I think this little community is a gem, myself. It's there, self-admittedly, to "promote competition, constructive criticism, and an exciting learning environment where people can better their passion for photography." And it does all these things very well.

Considering this is supposed to be a company skilled in website design, it doesn't get much worse than this. Pages under construction, cheap clipart, icons that don't work, and if you're in this business you know never, ever, to put an "under construction" page online. India being, as it is, a hotbed of software development these days, you'd expect better from an Indian site. Are we really outsourcing to these guys?

I believe this is the only time in many years of looking at web pages that I've ever found a Contact Form that has no "SEND" button. In disbelief I had to take a look at the underlying code and indeed, there is no actual mechanism there to make the form work. So if you're planning on contacting these guys via their web page, forget it. They were too lazy to include the button. And though they don't mention it, the phone number they supply is, of course, in India anyway. But you wouldn't know that because they forgot to include the country code.

According to their Tweets on Twitter, this is:

"India's best website designing and brand promotion company with dedicated SEO team"

Um.
I took a look at their other site, over at Blogspot, and copied their sales pitch:

"Hello every1. Greetings from all the members of CODING CREW...!
After hearin our name, u don't hav to b a genius to guess what we do. But to find out what all we do and how we do it, u need to follow this blog. As time is a scarce commodity, we would like to give u the jist of our company in just 3 words:

"Connect. Create. Conquer

"CONNECT: connect to the customer. We like to understand the specific needs and requirements of our customers so that we can deliver services tailored to optimize their benefits. For this, crew members are available 24x7.

"CREATE: you dream it, we create it. After we get connected to our clients, our team of talented coders gets down to work for creating and providing u with the best of products and services.

"CONQUER: conquer the world. What with the choicest products and round the clock maintenance services, we arm u to conquer this world run by technology."

Well dudes, u might do well on MySpace were u no liek every1 unnerstand u when u write liek what all u do. And if u think I am being a bit hard on u, I say u shuldnt post a phony review on this sight if its ur site u r reviewing. Cos that's cheating. OK?

The site has already gone. But since they couldn't spell "bodybuilding" I guess no big surprise there.

Come on folks, do the research! It's a Chinese site, they don't hide that and it took me only a couple of minutes to find that out. The site is run by:

Bin lin
Shang hai cheng qu
Shanghai, China *******

Who also owns a further 61 websites.

The Terms on the site also make clear that this is a Chinese operation.

Plus IF you make the effort to go to the genuine GHD site and navigate to this page:

http://www.ghdhair.com/beware-imitations/website-checker

You will find a Website Checker that will immediately tell you that likeyourhair.net is not a valid GHD site.

So much money might be saved by ten minutes research. Alas. Still, now you know, you won't get fooled again, right?

Pretty neat, I installed the FF plug-in without any issues and ran FF in "child mode" long enough to ascertain that it's at least very hard to get somewhere naughty, if not impossible (and it may be impossible, I just didn't have the time to tell).

Not being a kid by a very long stretch of the imagination, I would need sunglasses to put up with the color schemes on offer. I can see a very young child being enticed, but my experience of kids of 9 or 10 and upwards is that they won't go anywhere near something that looks like it was designed for babies. If there's a more sober design that offers the same features, I didn't find one.

I have one little criticism, and that's because when I unlocked the "real" Firefox the browser window was messed up quite badly. I had no minimize/close buttons and about an inch of the bottom margin was lost. I had to close FF and re-open it in "adult" mode. I've seen this before though, when using F11 to open the FF window to full screen, so it's likely a bug with the FF interface rather than anything to do with the glubble plug-in.

I did try using plain old Google with it and immediately ran into problems that required adult intervention, so it may be that this browser is not intended to be used by children for long periods without an adult at hand to enter the password when required. Not being able to access Ebay at all would definitely have caused tantrums with at least one 10-year old I know. But any attempt to make the web safer for kids deserves appreciation and it looks like this one is still being developed, as any new app needs to be, given the speed at which the web is evolving.

Having been around the web a long time, I get skeptical when I hear of an idea which claims to solve one of the fundamental issues. But it does look like this application has a good claim to having tackled the issue of child safety. The one thing it cannot do, is to prevent your child from getting their information in other ways - from other kids, or from other parents and their computers, or by smart kids bypassing the protections on school computers. If you're a worried parent, you'll still have to be vigilant, but at least this will give you a breathing space when your kid is on their home machine.

Flickr is that rare phenomenon, a site that has survived being taken over by Yahoo. Although some of the resulting developments haven't been entirely welcomed by the whole Flickr community, by and large the site has managed to retain its independent feel and hugely enthusiastic membership, and it's benefited by access to Yahoo's vast storage space and (usually) fast servers.

I think most people would agree that it's the community that makes the site, so it becomes more than just a place to dump the contents of your SD card (though you can still do that, too, if you want). It's hard to spend much time here before wanting to jump in and praise someone's work or start asking questions.

The best experience is as a paid-up member, which allows you to view other folks' images at varying sizes and organize your own images more effectively, amongst other things. Further, several third party apps have popped up in recent years to allow you to manipulate and reuse your images in a variety of ways. Flickr began by being the choice of the savvy web 2.0 photographer but has widened so considerably in its community that it has become *the* photo sharing site for most of us.

By the bye, Flickr is also a landmark site for another reason. It established a design style that would be seized on by many websites to come, and became a Web 2.0 icon for its clean, uncluttered interface, lack of advertising, and of course, the idiosyncratic spelling of the name, which would lead to a whole slew of snappy, single-word titles (think Twitter, Blippr, Newser, and so forth).

While there are other photo repositories and sharing sites, none of them have quite got the feel of Flickr. If you haven't visited yet, go take a look - even if you aren't a photographer yourself, there's so much great quality work to see here.

Another site offering a roundup of what's hot in silly novelties, nerdapproved does manage to find some you might actually consider buying rather than just staring at in disbelief. Sometimes they'll hit on something so immensely practical you can't imagine how you managed before - the illuminated tent peg, for example, or the sleep-enhancing toothpaste - and then you'll find less useful but equally charming products such as the screaming flying granny and the haunted toilet paper. And don't forget to check out the Racing Sperm, just the thing for the person who has everything this Christmas. It all reminds me of the novelties which used to be advertised in the back of boy's comics in the '50s, only these days only adults are silly enough to buy them.

It appears to be an intentional parody. The rest of the Christian web is divided over the existence of the Rev. Green and his alleged organization, but if you go to:

http://www.godhatesgoths.com/disclaimer.html

You'll see this:

"DISCLAIMER: The Godhatesgoths website, Parents Against Goth Movement and Gods Hammer Baptist Church are complete works of fiction. It is a satire/parody. When you use godhatesgoths.com you are agreeing and consenting to our terms and conditions of use which we, at our sole discretion, may change in any way at any time. Furthermore we do not guarantee that any of the materials or articles or content on this site will contain no errors, nor that they will be accurate in the slightest. Nor do we state that we agree in anyway with any of the content or views or beliefs within these articles, or with the fictional views of the fictional character Rev RG Green, or any of his fictional followers or fictional members of his fictional Church. This site is meant to be viewed as black humor, parody and satire on very real people and organizations out there, who DO think Goth and metal is the devil's music. For more information on people who really are speaking out against rock and Goth music please view our resources section. For our complete terms and conditions please email us, and we will be pleased to supply them in full. Thank you and I hope you enjoy our site."

That seems to be that, though the site has picked up nearly a quarter of a million hits and people are still arguing over whether it's the real thing or not.

I see that a pretend-reviewer has cut-and-pasted my words from the review of a different web site, and used them to promote this site and pretend he's capable of intelligible English. I guess I ought to be flattered.

But in fact he's just shot himself in the foot, as I'm now posting a further negative review but hadn't planned on doing so before. And I imagine the reputation of both this site and that reviewer has just gone down the tubes. Well, I can hope.

This site has already disappeared. Even so, here are 10 quick tips for unearthing a dodgy web site, in no particular order:

1. Google it. What does the description read? In this case, it reads

"Theairyeezy.com on sale is the only one official kanye west nike air yeezy air jeezy louis vuitton shoes online shop, we retail air yeezy, kanye west louis"

Uhuh. The only official site that sells nike shoes? So, you can't buy Nike shoes anywhere else?

Also Google some useful phrases such as "[sitename] counterfeit scam ripoff replicas fakes copies" and see what comes up. There's a chance that someone has already posted about a bad experience on some other site somewhere.

2. Look at the name of the site itself. If it's something like "buy-nike-shoes-here-and-save.com, it's most likely a risky proposition. The idea of names like this is to encourage Google to take them seriously; you don't have to. And most (not all, but most) retailers use their own name, not the name of a product. www.company.com is more likely to be genuine than www.wesellnikeshoes.com.

3. Take the time to look at the quality of the site itself. Is it riddled with silly spelling mistakes or typos? Does everything work properly when you click on it? Does it in fact look like a professional store front or has it been thrown together from bits and pieces?

4. Find and read the site's FAQ, if any. Are they obviously making things up? Or do they tell you, somewhere in the small print, that they're trading out of China?

5. See if the site's shipping terms, or any other parts of their Terms and Conditions, give the game away. Often there will be some clue here that invalidates a claim made somewhere else. Or, here you'll find the truth, such as a "no returns"policy tucked away in the small print.

6. Look at the very bottom of the pages, are there text links there to categories such as "about us", or "news", or "Terms and Conditions"? Do they all work, or do they lead to blank or suspect pages?

7. See if the owner is on Twitter. In this case he/she is, and using the site name as a Twitter name. Go to twitter.com and search for the suspect site name. Here's the Twitter listing of the owner of this particular site:

www.twitter.com/theairyeezy.

If you've been ripped off, you might like to send him a nice little private message. It won't help but it'll probably feel good. But in any case, look at his output. Is this a genuine professional store owner?

8. Who owns it? Look it up. The main domain registrar for top level domains is Internic, at http://www.internic.net, and you should look for the "whois" page. If the site isn't a top level domain (. Com,, net,. Org etc) then internic has a page listing other domain registrars to check with at http://www.internic.net/regist.html. It might look a little time consuming but then, you might be about to throw away your money. How much time is that worth?

9. Most obviously but not always considered enough: Are you being offered a bargain so good that you wonder if it's really true? Wholesale price? Does Prada do this? Think about it. Visit some other sites, including the manufacturer's home site, and then come back to this one. Are you still as confident?

10. Check Ebay. Does this site have an Ebay store? Would Gucci really have an Ebay store?

Lastly: if you are already suspicious enough to ask if a seller is genuine, they probably aren't genuine. Would you ask a liar to tell you whether he was telling the truth or not? Go with your feelings, there are other sites, other sellers, other days. These kinds of sites survive only on the greed of impulse buyers hoping to get something for nothing. Be careful out there.

(Review requested by Kevan P)

The first thing that hits you when you arrive here is a huge message reading "Paypal Credit Card Accept, Supper Discount."

O-Kaaaay... let's look at the "About Us" page... ah, blank... so let's see what's under "News"...

"This store is for demo purpose only. No order will be proceed."

I think we're done here.

There are millions of cookery websites out there, most of which are very similar to most of the rest. Now here's a personal blog that's something different and rather special, well worth the visit if you truly enjoy the experiences of cooking and eating and believe, as the author puts it, that:

"A little bit of high quality, high flavor food, is more enjoyable than a lot of low quality and boring food."

The first thing that's likely to strike you about this site is the outstanding photography. Great care clearly goes into the images that accompany the recipes, not just to help you visualize how the dish is intended to look, but out of an obvious love of photography itself. The careful use of space and color is such that you won't be noticing it's a blog template for very long; the design is worthy of any commercial site.

So, on to the recipes, and here's where I've got to suggest you go take a look for yourself; tastes are so different that one man's meat is... errr... well that's perhaps not the best allegory for a cookery site, so I'll move swiftly on to the site's philosophy, which is to aim for recipes that feature fresh, organic, and if possible home-made and home-grown ingredients whilst manoeuvering around the ubiquitous corn syrups and hydrogenated oils of this world.

I can hear some of you muttering, ahh, one of those pretentious organic people, and yes, I know science has no proof to offer us that organic foods are any different from any other in any sense, and the manufacturers urgently want to tell us that corn syrup is, in fact, no worse for us than using gobs of sugar, and somewhere, no doubt, a researcher is even now working to prove that monosodium glutamate is the long sought-after cure for the common cold. But there are no snobbish pretensions here, just a person who obviously cares about food, a genuine "foodie", hence the name of the site.

Now I must admit to doing a little cooking myself, from time to time. When it's too wet to walk to Burger King, you know. And being something of a fan of Indian vegetarian food, I immediately spotted the link to a dosa recipe. I'm enormously in awe of dosas, the paper-thin pancakes that come wrapped around potatoes and peas scented with aromatic cumin and spices. And I admit that I've attempted to make my own dosas in the past, with tragic results, so whilst it was exciting to find a link to a dosa recipe here, I was grateful to see that I am not alone in discovering this deceptively simple technique to be beyond mere (Western) human understanding. And finding a cook honest enough not only to admit defeat, but to go to the trouble of photographing the failure, well, that's something special. This site is a gem, do check it out. As the title says, it's "food for anyone with an address."

Purely visual jokes are hard to review in writing, obviously: the more one tries to explain, the less funny they become. So, what to say...? Well, this isn't just *bad* fairground art, it's *funny* bad fairground art.

That's about it, really. It may well give you a laugh over your morning coffee. Which makes it worth bookmarking, right there.

Yes, it's not what it appears to be, but folks, in your rush to get a bargain, are you taking the time to find out what a genuine site looks like? Because UGG themselves have a list of all the genuine UGG® Australia resellers and stores on their own official website, and this isn't one of them. Further, UGG® Australia make clear that if a site contains the term UGG in the URL and it's not uggaustralia.com, it isn't an UGG® Australia authorized dealer.

Go here for the genuine UGG® Australia information:

http://www.uggaustralia.com/retailStores/counterfeit.aspx