Talk:Conduit (company)

Removed Vandalism

Gpeja I just removed major vandalism that appeared last night and I wanted to ask you to weigh in since I have a WP:COI and normally will not make direct edits. But this seemed an exigent circumstance, allowable since a single purpose account defaced the lead sentence of the article with an unsourced, extremely biased, false and highly damaging statement. 68.110.108.68 (this is the only edit ever from this account) inserted the following as the new lead:

"Conduit Ltd.' is a company that promotes spyware and malware. It claims to be..."

Given I have a COI, I would feel more comfortable if you could please weigh as to whether made the right decision. Thanks.BC1278 (talk) 18:18, 7 February 2016 (UTC)BC1278

Remove false assertions without attribution

I have a WP:COI here because I am a paid business consultant to Conduit. As such, I can't make direct edits without independent review.

Two very inflammatory statements have been added to the article with any citation.

"This toolbar is flagged by most antivirus software as potentially unwanted and adware. Conduit's toolbar software is often downloaded by malware packages from other publishers."

These statements are not factual, have not citation, and should be removed urgently. They are highly damaging to the company.BC1278 (talk) 23:59, 6 June 2016 (UTC)BC1278

 Done. -- The Voidwalker ^Discuss 00:24, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

• Think a more experienced editor needs to look at this and find a citation for what a less experienced editor could not find. This article has already been flanged as an advertisement and the average user can only get rid of this said tool bar with help. i.e., Remove Conduit Toolbar and search.conduit.com (Uninstall Guide). Thus, it does indeed appear to be malware. So the article needs improvement or AfD. Thank you BC1278 for bringing it to our attention.--Aspro (talk) 02:39, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Now the sentences have been restored again. The references still do not support the statements Maproom has restored, after they were deleted by The Voidwalker

The first statement is that: "This toolbar is flagged by most antivirus software as potentially unwanted and adware." The source added by Maproom is a software company instruction manual for removing potentially unwanted products using its product. Even if the source were acceptable as reliable (which it is not - it's an instruction manual, not a news source.), it does not purport to say what is in the article - that Conduit is flagged by "most antivirus software" as potentially unwanted and adware. The source is an instruction manual - it doesn't report on what other software packages do.

The second statement is that: "Conduit's toolbar software is often downloaded by malware packages from other publishers." The source cited by a Maproom is one paragraph in a book that cites to and quotes from community discussion board, malwaretips.com. Again, even if the source were reliable (which it is not - it's a community discussion board), it does not purport to say that "Conduit's toolbar software is often downloaded by malware packages..." Instead, it quotes the community discussion board as saying that many free Conduit removal tools are actually malware themselves.

So again (this request was originally made on Teahouse ), I'd request that these two sentences be removed (they are also written in the present tense, even though the toolbar became defunct in 2013.)

There is an entire article about the defunct toolbar at Conduit toolbar, where bad sources and statements like these have been added, then removed, then added again, and removed again, etc, for many years, with a raging debate on the Talk page and protected article status for two years. In fact, a bunch of bad source, like discussion boards, need to be removed from the Conduit toolbar article yet again. Some of the sources are fine, but many are not. But that's a separate discussion from the Conduit (company) article. An admin previously decided to separate out the Conduit (company) article from the toolbar article precisely because the minutia of this debate about the defunct toolbar was overwhelming the information about the current company. I'd suggest that the one sentence summary about the toolbar controversy in the company article is enough without adding further elaboration, given there's a link to an entire article on the subject. Otherwise, we also need to add background about the defunct toolbar, like it being used by 260,000 publishers (including Zynga, Major League Baseball and Greenpeace) with a reach of 250 million end users. I suggest we just leave all this to the toolbar article.BC1278 (talk) 21:07, 13 June 2016 (UTC)BC1278

References