Rogue RegTidy/RegistryConvoy: Would you let him do your marketing?

I certainly wouldn't, not if the following is anything to go by. This all started after the members of WoT (Web of Trust), came across his site and flagged it as rogue. Nigel Lew, who runs marketing firm "J.N. Lew Design Group" popped along to tell all of us lowly folk that his company does the marketing for RegTidy and that it wasn't a rogue.

You can forgive him for not knowing that in Windows, REGTIDY.DLL <> RegTidy.dll (only Linux/MAC's are case sensitive). But from here I'm afraid, it goes downhill. His first mistake of course, was assuming that us lowly folk don't actually know what we're doing, or as he put it;

Hi, my job is brand management. That is what I was referring to. Its abundantly clear that most of you folks don't do this for money.

I do however handle this sort of IT stuff, I am looking at the flippen source code as we speak. I think I have a much better handle on what said file does than noobs and folks that don't know how to sandbox an app or run a VM.

And like I said, you folks provided me with weeks of damage control, for that, I thank you kindly :)

When pointed out to him that RegTidy was also known as RegistryConvoy, he suggested that it was simply because the latter was being rebranded due to a previous marketing company going nuts - suggesting to him that this was infact a load of codswollap as both had only existed for a matter of weeks (regtidy.com created 2009-07-07, with registryconvoy.com created 2009-06-11), he then decided that actually, it was because;

The latter is a much better name, period. That is not rocket science.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions of his proclaiming he's not a programmer, but had the source code in front of him and could tell it was legit.

Progressing further, I decided enough was enough and posted my own test results (he somehow thought we'd not actually tested it and were just slating it for err .... ??), which were;

1. It claims errors exist even BEFORE it has actually scanned anything;

http://temerc.com/imgRegTidy_com_-_main_UI.gif

2. It listed over 400 "problems" that either didn't exist and/or, were NOT problems (infact, removal of some of the keys, including some of the EMPTY keys, would have crippled the system).

http://temerc.com/imgRegTidy_com_-_scan_results.gif

3. It provides no means of saving the results to a log for manual analysis

Ref:
http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/4013-regtidy-2009?comment=17751#comment-17751

Getting on a bit, Nigel then decided that actually, the program WAS displaying misleading behaviour and in his words;

Most if not all dodgy behavior has been removed from the app based on my consultations a week ago. I have no interest in marketing an app that is a load of crap. Most, if not all suspect marketing is in the middle of being removed and replaced with the ones for the corresponding app as we speak as well.

Nigel then informed us that the new version, complete with his suggestions, was now on the site ready for us.

So, latest download link can be found anywhere on regtidy.com it does not auto do shit except start with windows which is easily rectified in the properties like every other app on the planet from win messenger to data recovery stuff.

Alas however, I tested the "latest" version, and can only surmise that his claims of improvements were absolute tosh, the misleading behaviour was still there, as were the abundance of F/P's (F/P's that either led to keys not present, led to problems that weren't actually problems, or keys that if removed, would've crippled the system).

Nigel didn't like my results however, and decided he would backpeddle a bit, and tell me that actually, the new version was not on the site yet .... woops!. Questioning this however, showed that Nigel actually decided that profanity and threats of hanging my ass out in public, would be a better form of marketing.

Given the conversation thus far, I can't see this getting any better for poor Nigel as he simply doesn't seem to get it, instead trying to claim we're all n00bs that don't know anything and are basing our claims on the detections of one AV or another (since the conversation started, 3 more vendors now flag RegTidy and regtidy.com). He doesn't seem to understand that yes, most of us do this stuff as a hobby voluntarily, but some of us actually do this as a full time job, and we're damn well good at what we do (that's not to say we're not prone to mistakes, of course we are) and in this particular case, we're 100% correct - RegTidy/RegistryConvoy or whatever name they want to go with, IS A ROGUE.

What I do find intruiging, is that RegTidy's developers haven't bothered to comment whatsoever, instead deciding to leave it all to Nigel (damn sure if I was a legit vendor and someone was saying otherwise, I wouldn't care who I'd hired - I'd be the first to jump in to defend myself and my programs), which given what I've seen thus far, is going to have been a huge mistake on RegTidy's part.

You can read the full story at on the MyWot forums;

http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/4013-regtidy-2009