Geewhipped

You clearly have reading comprehension issues. From the blog post: "At that point, the referral system became useless to me so I removed the links and just left the review stand. I updated it from time to time and answered any questions people posted as comments or emailed to me. I was grateful for a product I really like and for the free monitoring."

See below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3971061 As it said in the post, the review existed when there was no referral program in place...I answered questions and helped current customers during this time because I like the product and I genuinely wanted the company to succeed. There was never a "promise in exchange for good reviews."

Thank you for being the one to toss this out there... I also feel this is a strong possibility but I didn't want to be the one to say it.

See below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3971321

We did submit the text of the takedown notice to chillingeffects.org fwiw

Sorry if I didn't make this clear in the blog post, but the part I'm most upset about is not that I got the takedown notices... it's that they are using bogus takedown notices at all. Read the emails between me and the "SVP Interactive" at LifeShield and also with the rep from the IP Protection company (who admits that I'm right, the takedowns are bogus). I'm not whining about being inconvenienced.

Oh, and it isn't that they "managed to screw up" ... they completely own up to what they've done (and continue to do). They know it's wrong, but decided to keep doing it because it was getting results. All this was covered in the blog post.

Also, I'm nowhere near spent.

As do I :)

I can see how you'd think that, but I thought it should be included (because it lends more to the story of how they are being shady). The way I see it, we entered into an agreement with the referral program. They didn't honor their side of it. That's unethical. As for the review itself, I made it very, very clear that my links were referral links. I also made it clear that I was benefiting from the referrals (this was true of both of the referral programs). People could choose to believe that I was being honest or choose to believe that I was a shill. No trickery involved.

Sorry about that, we've been meaning to update the look of pskl.us for quite a while and we just haven't gotten around to it.