Yeah, I have to say that was kinda easy to read between the lines bear. I do agree with you though, I really feel it is the responsibility of the owners of the sites to have their own quality assurance people. Actually, I think the bulk of the testing is the responsibility of the creators before anything gets submitted, and they should provide a list of the testers and some form of the results of the testing with the submission. As far as an independent agency goes, I have my doubts about that...although a group of volunteers that DON'T take payment for their services would be ok. That's what I had in mind when I discussed setting up an independent group in another thread. I just seems that when you pay somebody to test something, you expect a certain amount of leeway with testing results, that may not be acceptible to a consumer. That creates a means for a vendor to ignore a what may be a real problem and say, "well screw you it passed testing so you must be doing something wrong", and the organization to say "well it passed our tests so you are obviously not using it within the specifications". The problem is, pretty much as you said though, independance, impartiality and integrity are questionable at best with any group of people, but even more so with an angency that requires payment for it's services. If they want money, that means they have to have profits to offset expenses and administrative salaries...and I've seen that spell underhanded dealings many times before. Even the United Way was not immune to so little of the contributions going to the charities they supported because of inflated administrative salaries and expenses. They even had one guy flying off on junkets and purchasing personal items that prompted the government to require strict oversight and controls. And when it comes to measuring profit over adherence to standards and stringent testing...well even Firestone and Ford caved in to profit. You can't tell me those tires weren't given the benefit of the doubt on any test results to get them on to market. If something wasn't rotten in Denmark with quality assurance there...I don't think Ford and Firstone would be pointing fingers at each other for the tire failures. I'm sorry, I think there are way too many honorable and qualified beta testers that would gladly offer their services for free or in exchange for a finished version of the product they tested, that wouldn't be willing to exchange their integrity for anything.