While we bloggers can differentiate a good site from a bad one, we generally aren't vocal about it. Normal users can rant all day, but when we make a statement, it is counted as an official stand of the parent website. While this is normal, we do feel restricted in a way... We can't warn the people against other "bad" sites because of the sole reason that it would cause nothing but in-fighting in the scene.

But it gets different when some sites start to rip-off other people's great work and modifying it for their own glory. A few hours ago, I got a humble request from Mathieulh, Dark_Alex and harleyg. It was about the fact that a certain site, PS2NFO, was editing the readme files of homebrew releases to remove their names from the credits section. It seems that they even went to the lengths of hex-editing the applications to remove the names of Fanjita, Skylark, psp250 and Mathieulh, all of whom have been hugely responsible to get the PSP homebrew scene where it is today.

That's still not all. We also noticed the fact that the PS2NFO admin started impersonating Dark_Alex in their forums to get more glory. Mathieulh, Dark_Alex and harleyg wanted us to put this statement up on our site. Here's the official statement:

"Dark_AleX never goes to PS2NFO and never will. PS2NFO go as low as impersonating developers to make themselves seem exclusive. They lie to everyone and steal credits. They impersonated Dark_AleX several times despite our warning on Maxconsole. When people post that Dark_AleX is a fake on their forums, they just delete the post and continue to make it look like he is the real one.

Because we fear for the sake of the entire scene due to such behaviour, we have no choice but to warn as many people as possible. They also remove credits from the people they banned such as Mathieulh. When the libtiff helloworld was released, they hex edited the tiff to remove all credits apart from NOPx86. Fanjita, Skylark and psp250's name was removed. We hope they won't repeat such lame acts again and they will leave the PSP scene alone"

"Bleh, standard practise from that site. Low pirate scum, the lot of 'em."

"After it ran it's course for a day, we received unconfirmed reports that it wasn't the real Dark_AleX who actually posted the thread. As a result, we posted the IPs logged from the account and an offer to Contact Us for the real Dark_AleX to (re)claim his account here. Until he chooses to, we have now seized the account and I will personally use it in his absence on our boards. Not much more we can do at this"