Hi Culperer,
unlike many others, I find your post (the first post in this thread) quite interesting. However, you have to realize that the forum is probably not the best place to ask these questions. The vast majority of your questions are related to avast itself (not the forum) and its further development - which is, at least for now, something the forum staff (including the evangelists) can hardly influence...The thing is, the people who work here at the forum
hope that we (Alwil) are doing our best and making sure avast is one of the best - and from time to time, they find out that avast may not be the best and that even avast has its weaknesses. Sometimes, it's a very unpleasant thing - especially considering that the people who're here to help cannot really change anything in the program itself.
Anyway, our strong belief is that the community factor on the avast forum is a very important thing. You may not like it, but we do and consider this as a clear competitive edge. It is one of the pillars of the Alwil product strategy.
I'd like to take this opportunity and give all people who're helping others on this forum a big thank you. You're vital to avast, and the way you work on the forum is admirable.
The problems we're seeing are mainly related to the forum concept itself (everyone sees everything, and everyone is allowed to post everywhere) and we will discuss further how to address these issues...
Now, to answer Culperer's questions:
Currently, Comodo is a few actual releases away from being relied upon.
I have to disagree on this one, but only time will tell...
For example, AVG is now just as good as Avast for what AVG is designed to do. There support forum for the free version is a no fooling around affair. It is not a social community but one that is there to only address problems. This cuts down on nonsense and gets the developers to only see posts related to the issue of AVG.
You may not be aware of this, but the AVG forum is not frequented by any AVG (Grisoft) developers at all. It is a community (voluntary) project only, hosted on the Grisoft website.
You may not know, but Grisoft is based just ~120 miles from us and we know
many things about each other. I'd say that the amount of information we know about each other is directly proportional to the number of beers we have had together...
Also, PC Tools AV has reached ICSA and VB100 status. It is no longer something to be scoured upon.
PC Tools AV is now based on the VirusBuster engine. With all respect, I don't think their engine is on par, at least not for now. If you need some facts, we can talk furhter.
This thread is not intended to find criticism with Avast but to take a look upon the direction Avast is going compared to other programs we used to, and for some still do, laugh at.
Sure. You have to realize that the avast 4.x engine is now almost 5 years old (Avast 4.0.0 was first released in December 2002). That's a very long time. Of course, the original 4.0 release was quite a different program from the current 4.7.x builds, but some of the weaknesses and limitations of the engine (and other parts of the program) persist.
The dev team has been busy working on the new version for some time now. Our hope is that version 5.x will catapult avast from the middle to the top (now it's just a hope; let's wait with evaluation until after the program ships). Be sure that we're closely monitoring the competition, and making sure we're not behind (in the 4.x builds) and are quite ahead (in the 5.x series).
This is no longer a laughing matter.
There has never been, at least for me.
Avast has a few competitors in their market niche nipping at its heels. We need to take a serious look at the competition within this niche, which is the market niche of developers that offer a free use as well as a pay for license to use.
You can stay assured - there's quite a few people at Alwil working full time and doing exactly that for living.
Thanks
Vlk
P.S. I'd be very grateful if you could please stay on topic, most of the posts in this thread are completely nonsense...
