Suggestion to AVAST on how to respond to future false positive incidents.

[worksong]

By your statistics, there are 100,000,000 AVAST users, & only 80,000 are registered on this forum.  It's simply not a good place to disseminate information about a critical event.

A simple mass email, sent immediately on discovering the error, would have saved me--& countless others--much grief & time wasted:

"A major false positive event has been discovered with VPS update 091203-0, & AVAST users worldwide are seeing many files flagged as trojan Win32:Delf-MZG.  We recommend ignoring these alerts for now by pressing 'no action.'  Stay tuned for updates, or check the web forum for more detail."

[DavidR]

Check out this topic, http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=51783.0.

[worksong]

Thanks...but the message you linked to is actually what prompted my post.

My point is that it's frustrating to see dedicated people providing useful answers & info that most users will never see.  The simple suggestion is that a concise statement be proactively emailed to all registered users...who could then choose whether to consult the forum for more detail, or to ignore.

At the very least, an "incident alert" email would cause users to think twice, & possibly do research, before taking radical action prompted by an apparent AVAST! crisis of major proportions.

[DavidR]

Believe it or not, there have recently been some complaints about the us of the iNews pop-up by avast.

Now that would be a way to alert users to this development and measures to combat it.

Some people consider these pop-ups intrusive, objectionable, god forbid what they would think of being emailed by avast.

Because of the time frame of this many were actually totally in the dark (literally) to this because of the release time of the 091203-0 VPS update. So many would be somewhat confused by emails relating to a problem, which by the time they got the email was closed. So it isn't easy to strike a balance.

Even though I knew about it as I was up and around at the time, I even ensured I downloaded the 091203-0 VPS and ran a scan, but I didn't get a single alert; lucky I guess, as it was my intention to submit alerts via the report as FP link, which should have started to place entries in the very FP upload logs Vlk talked of.

From avast version 5.0 there is a new means of registration rather than the present one which you give your email address. I don't know if that method of registration will require the input of data by the user, so there may not be an email address to email.

So perhaps the iNews function could be a means of early notification.

[pinnacle]

I agree use the iNews popup.

[dragotron]

Believe it or not, there have recently been some complaints about the us of the iNews pop-up by avast.

Now that would be a way to alert users to this development and measures to combat it.

Some people consider these pop-ups intrusive, objectionable, god forbid what they would think of being emailed by avast.

I think if people are willing to go through the trouble of installing avast! theyd be willing to be alerted that the virus they're being warned about isn't really a virus.

[DavidR]

Unfortunately my suggestion isn't as workable as first thought, as:
a) the iNews goes out at the time when a VPS Update is done, so if there is a corrective VPS Update available, it would be of limited use.
b) first the problem would have to be identified as per the link I gave in my first post, people would have to be called in to get to the bottom of and deal with the problem.
c) so that would have to happen before any iNews were considered necessary, and an iNews update set-up; this would be after identifying the problem/cause by this time it is likely Alwil will have put together the corrective VPS Update.