A shareware trade group wrote its own rules for nag screens

The workload

Meeting the Association of Shareware Professionals' own Developer Member Standards, adopted 16 December 1998, required a shareware author to build specific behavior into a program before calling it ASP-compliant: a limited evaluation period long enough for genuine testing, an on-screen warning before that period expired, registration-reminder screens that did not unduly interfere with evaluation, documentation explaining how to register and what registering unlocked, a way to uninstall the product, and a minimum of three months of technical support after purchase, all without extra charge. An internal body, the ASP Author Compliance Committee, judged disputes and could give a member 30 days to fix a non-compliant product before recommending termination to the ASP Board.

What the documents show

Verified, from the ASP's own site: the association's About page says it was formed in April 1987 to strengthen the future of try-before-you-buy software as an alternative to conventional retail software, with members subscribing to a code of ethics; that page's own mission statement lists setting programming, marketing and support standards among its goals. The separate Code of Professional Conduct binds members to conduct business to the highest ethical standards and bars using the ASP membership database for direct marketing without board approval. The association's current historical-archive site, retrieved 16 September 2026, states the ASP ceased operations and formally dissolved on 31 December 2021 after nearly 34 years, so it does not operate today.

The operating cost

These documents describe conduct requirements, not a membership price; none of the fetched ASP pages states a specific dues figure for developer or industry membership. The standards do quantify one obligation in time rather than money: a minimum three-month support commitment after a customer's purchase, unpaid, that a member had to budget as part of running a compliant shareware product.

The stop condition

Under the ASP's own rules, a non-compliant member had 30 days, or a longer period the compliance committee set, to fix a product before the committee could recommend expulsion, a documented enforcement stop condition. For the organization itself, the stop condition is verified by its own current site: membership stopped being accepted in mid-2020 and the association formally ceased operating on 31 December 2021, after what its own page calls nearly 34 years of support by and for independent software vendors.

• Would a modern one-person software business accept an unpaid three-month support minimum as the cost of using a trust mark?
• What enforcement actually happens when a self-regulating trade body's compliance committee finds a violation?
• Does a nag-screen or trial-limit design choice still map onto rules a defunct 1998 standard first wrote down?

The ASP's compliance documents show a private, member-enforced standard, not a law: a developer who broke the rules risked losing the ASP's trust mark, not a court judgment. The association's own current site confirms that entire enforcement structure ended with its 2021 dissolution.