Ian Landsman had a link to a post by Andy Brice.  Andy submitted a bogus program (a text file renamed to .exe) to hundreds of download sites and actually received “awards” from many of the sites.  This mirrors my experience with a couple of shareware programs I wrote years ago.  In fact, I still get a few “you’ve been awarded 5 stars” emails every month, but I don’t even bother looking at them anymore.

Great job Andy!

Update: A great post by Bob Walsh discussing Andy’s experiment.