I will be presenting a paperSome questionable web construction approaches and practiceat WASET Singapore 2010

2010-08-12: I wrote the following about WASET in a correspondence:

WASET's management is a huge problem.  WASET may have some good ideas, but their web sites and management styles are ineffective and easily raise suspicions about their competence and credibility.   Some examples:

• Registration should be done online with a credit card.  The current practice of requiring wiring money must be abolished.
  
• Final conference program should not be published as a PDF file.  Such practice is ineffective and does not engender professional respect.
  
• Owing to the same ineffectiveness, as of today,  post-April 2010 WASET papers remain invisible on the Net.  See   http://www.waset.org/proceedings.php
  

2010-08-09:

I searched Google for WASET Singapore 2010 and could scarcely find any information.   It appears that the original web pages that announced and attracted me to WASET August 2010 International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Electronic & Communication Engineering mega conferences in Singapore have been taken off line.  To promote the conference, more information about the conference should be available, instead of less or none.  If WASET is not promoting the conference in which I am presenting a paper, then I feel I should.  Thus, this update.

2010-08-03: An update:
I took this entry off line after I finally received a response from WASET on 2010-07-29, as follows:

Dear Delegate,
The Updated Singapore Conference Program is available at http://www.waset.org/programs/Singapore10.pdf

Best regards,
B. Brojack

Reading the pdf, you can see my paper Some questionable web construction approaches and practice is scheduled to be read on the first day of the multi-conferences, Wednesday, 2010-08-25.

WASET does not respond to my request for refund, so I assume it will not happen.

I decided to bring this entry back online after I received inquiries about it.  Many people are as anxious and curious about WASET as I.

A friend wrote:

I hope for your sake that WASET turns out not to be a fraud. Do Tweet or ILT [meaning, send updates to the I Love Taiwan google group] the updates on the situation as you have them. 

I too hope WASET offers genuinely useful conferences for scholarly presentation and publication.   If I go to WASET August 2010 Singapore multi-conferences, I promise the world an update.]  

After a paper I submitted to the August 2010 WASET (World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology) conference in Singapore was accepted for presentation and publication,  I began to suspect that WASET is a fraud.  To my surprise,  before mid-June 2010, repeated google searches for waset resulted in no negative comments against WASET, save for one web site I could not take seriously.   I will explain later why I suspected WASET a fraud.

I decided not to pay the $450 Euros registration fee until I received an email from alerts@waset.org, stating

the Tentative SINGAPORE 2010 Conference Program is available at http://www.waset.org/programs/Singapore10.pdf

I was not impressed with the conference program.  But it changed my mind about not registering because it appeared to show some real people presenting papers.  I am a University of San Diego professor.  I submitted a paper to WASET August 2010  Singapore conference because I will be in Asia at that time.  I had invested a significant amount of time with WASET after I made a decision to submit paper to it, and made my paper conform to its required layout, format and style.   If I had made a mistake, let me bite the bullet.

As a prerequisite to register online, I needed to wire 450 Euros to an account in Dubai, United Arab Emirate.  This felt more like paying a ransom than paying for a conference.   Why couldn't WASET accept a credit card, like anyone else? Worse, my bank charged me $35 for the international wiring.

Interesting, yet most unpleasant things began to happen after I wired the 450 Euros. Here is a summary

• registration for the conference at http://www.waset.org/author.php failed using whatever browser and whatever file format the registration page instructs.
• To date, I sent more than fifteen requests to WASET  for help.  They ignored most of them.   When they did respond,  they wanted me to try http://www.waset.org/author.php again and again.

One response was promising.

Dear Author,

Thanks for registration! We have received your documents.

Best regards,
B. Brojack, Secretariat
Editor-in-Science
http://www.waset.org/

In this message, Brojack, Secretariat assured me that I had finally registered.  But her/his next message asked me to try http://www.waset.org/author.php again, even though I complained repeatedly that this registration page always failed with  the same error message.

Finally, I wrote B. Brojack, Secretariat of WASET, for either straightening out my registration impasse, or else refunding my 450 Euros.   No response!

To summarize, I wired 450 Euros to an account in Dubai, UAE to pay for the registration fee for a WASET conference in Singapore.  I was instructed to register for the conference online at http://www.waset.org/author.php, which always failed. I wrote WASET to request for help. They ignored me.  I asked for refund, they also ignored.