Avira watch - Eckzahn may be right IMHO

And we're supposed to send every one of these users who use such a homerouter a new one?

This is not a problem with our routers. It's their's that are causing the headache in this case.

 

Marcus, just let it go. In my viewpoint, a lot more has been made of this then should have been. I personally do not see where Avira has really done anything wrong, nor would anything I have seen here make me want to stop using it.

It was made to look like the world had exploded and the reality is, it farted.

 

Trjam: Now that last sentence put a smile on my face. Thanks

 

I don't really see where did you get that I'm suggesting this. But now that you've mentioned it - instead of implementing hackish work-arounds for broken routers, stating clearly the cause of update failures in such cases and pointing users to report the issue to their ISP/vendor/whoever supplied them with the broken SOHO router junk would be a whole lot more beneficial. If you want a fallback meanwhile, there's been easy enough one I've suggested. Hardwiring defunct DNS zones into update client doesn't look like a good fallback at all, not even for overloaded servers due to TTL issues.

Also requesting HijackThis log obviously is less than useful for similar cases. Why there's no diagnostic tool usable for debugging issues like this in Avira?

 

well I apologize for falling for the Chicken Little, "Sky is falling" syndrome. Please let Stefan know also. Avira ia just fine.

 

Well... and since I'm already quite tired by this whole affair, couple of final suggestions:

1/ Ammend the EULA to clearly state that
- Avira Free is adware;
- the avnotify.* stuff uses Google Analytics (and/or other third parties) for tracking purposes

2/ Seriously reconsider the obnoxious popup advertising. Feels like pre-2000 stuff, horrible. Also, the issue won't go away once you start falsely detecting tools that disable that "functionality" as Trojans (NonotifyAvira is what I'm speaking about here.) The mere existence of such tools should suggest you that you've clearly crossed a line which is bearable for users. They simply won't stand it - they'll work around it or switch to another product.

3/ Fix the forums. Get a professional staff there that is able to provide useful support and clear answers (as long as the business policy allows) instead of boilerplate PR and blind guessing plus quite arrogant attitude towards paying (and potentially paying) customers. Drop the "antispam" policy, it kills the forum and communication.

4/ QA: related to #3. Why's it so horribly hard to get beta-testing stuff. Clearly the v10 fiasco shows that the amount of testing was absolutely insufficient. The amount of obvious bugs suggests there's a lot left to be deserved in testing labs. In this thread someone cut'n'pasted my post here which describes the list of (most serious) issues I've encountered during one week test on a couple of systems. Until now, well - no reply. These are critical bugs making the product unusable; we'll fix it soon is no good reply there. Also, not listening to the (apparently way too few) betatesters who keep reporting issues is a bad approach here. Quite a couple of them complained of this here, on Avira forums and elsewhere.

5/ Damage control - forcing the new version down people's throat no matter how broken it is and pulling older versions down from the website is the most horrible decision here. All the forced upgrades where the product does not honor user configuration to NOT upgrade, the 60 seconds "prompt" - hey, people sleep at night and don't turn off their boxes all the time etc. etc. etc. There's STILL no official download link for Avira Free v9 on the website two weeks after you've unleashed this broken upgrade on your users. People who downgrade their paid SW to v9 get forced to v10 again, ignoring their configuration. People get upgraded in the middle of the night without reboot, leaving their boxes w/ defunct AV/firewall. Bad, bad, bad.

I personally have uninstalled Avira from all my personal boxes, will no longer install it on my friends boxes, and needless to say I won't renew the paid licenses I had and that will expire soon. There are alternatives which work, don't nag and are free. I don't have time to do post-release debugging and beta-testing for you. If you wanted beta testers, then make it easy for people to participate and listen to what they say. Unleashing obviously unfinished product will burn you quite bad, this botched release is about as much as you can afford here. Do it again and you are history. What a shame for such excellent product, I loved v9.

Bye.

 

well you are entitled to your thoughts but as I said, doesnt mean it is that way for all of us. Version 10 will be fine.

 

Folks,

The key items raised in the course of this thread have been responded to in a detailed fashion. The topical content is starting to wander rather far afield. That means it's time to close the out this thread.

Follow-up discussions on some of the additional issues raised above can be the subject of dedicated threads if further treatment is warranted.

Blue