Having a problem does not give anyone the right to use foul language, especially if it does not even involve a matter of life and death.
It is really psychology as VLK puts it. It shows pretty much the behavior of people when they come face to face with dire circumstance. And too bad, some people really break when they are faced with not so overwhelming problems. I need not elaborate who just displayed such an awesome behavior. Pardon the sarcasm. I still believe in the diplomatic way of doing things and that using foul stuff doesn’t get you anywhere when it can be avoided.
After all in the end, problems can be resolved faster if only people are much calmer and level headed.
If you’re referring to cazoza’s avatar, I’d agree that it’s a bit questionable but still acceptable. I don’t know how about where you live, but I’d say that at least in Europe, such a picture could easily make it to mainstream media (TV, magazines, advertising etc) with no restrictions.
It’s not supposed to be the ONLY way (although it is the prefered way). We do obviously have staff that’s taking care of the support tickets. If it took them 6 days to get back to the OP, that’s poor, agreed, but most of the tickets are handled much faster IMO.
The avast forum started about 7 years ago, and I’ve been around for pretty much all that time. For the most part, I’ve seen it very friendly and helpful - although at times, they were obviously problems of this type (but not very often).
Now, regarding the foul language, the forum software was supposed to do some automatic substitutions (of the f-* and s-* words, for example). This obviously failed - we’ll have to look into why (maybe some of the recent forum upgrades broke this feature). We obviously want to keep the forum teenager-friendly (and politically correct) but we don’t want to delete posts/threats just because someone uses an ugly word or two…
Edit: the feature is now back, as you can see in the first post of this thread.
I think Avast has the most friendly, informative forum I know about.
It’s part of Avast’s competitive advantage.
On a lot of forums you get posts such as “use the search…”. Well, may be people should use the search but I see no point in answering a question with a terse, judgemental comment. People on the Avast forum are a lot nicer and easily more forgiving.
I’m a member of Avira’s forum and don’t agree with the rule about being uber-registered to post replies to others’ posts because they had a problem with a few users. That’s not in the spirit of forums.
Mieko I am also quite shocked with the foul language and attitude used. As a mostly reading and non contributing user I was amazed that the mods have not taken down this thread because of the language. You paid quite a lot of money for the licenses, were angry, but that is no explanation. I do think that you should edit the first post - not to delete it, or change the form, but just add the permanent link to the post where issue is resolved, and it is confirmed that troubles (as many of us suspected, and this is mostly the case) were caused by the e-mail account, which disliked for some reason license extension. You were very closed minded about such explanation, honestly speaking at some point I’ve thought you were either a troll or someone with a cracked/blacklisted serial trying to fraud a new one here. Or both. All because of the attitude. But this is your decision, I’m thinking that most users would agree. Visitors often do not read whole messages, explanation here is on like 7th or 6th page, and the first post still contains very serious accusations.
Still, you’ve got a point here - ways of sending the license should change. E-mail providers have a variety of rules, also it is quite often that such e-mail does land in the spam, and an average user does not have the smarts to check the spam folder… Why not to provide as an alternative a link in the message (if this message does not contain an attachment - click here), or on the website after submitting the form for the license? It would be stored on the FTP let’s say for 24h after the submission. There are many ways how the unreliable communication vehicle as the e-mail is could be bypassed.
I really don’t see any use in this fucking shitfilter. ;D Where is the difference in spelling the word correctly or substituting 2 letters with a star? Does it hinder me or anybody else on the world (except, maybe, North-Koreans) do understand the word, it’s meaning?
This is a typical american way of handling something: do something useless, pretend it helps to solve the problem and say a prayer. E.g. everybody knows what is in the brown little paperbags teenagers carry with them in a car - it’s an alcoholic beverage. But the cute brown bag prevents anybody from seeing it, so it is just great to pretend everything is fine… This filter is just the same brown paper bag.
Yes, that is the avatar I found questionable. What does the fact that photo could make it to mainstream media (Europe or elsewhere) have to do with it being acceptable in a supposedly serious antivirus vendor’s forum? It is distracting and beneath this forum and Awil. (Sorry if that is too blunt, but I am a very honest and direct person and say what I think both good and bad).
I understand and agree that this forum should be the sole support for the free version users. But someone who bought a paid version and who has a license problem, in particular, to not get prompt help…that is bad publicity for Awil as the free version users read that and think that maybe they don’t want to purchase Avast Professional, etc. since they apparently won’t get better support even for a license problem. A license problem, of all things, should be settled very quickly. I hope you work on this and figure out how to avoid such a delay in the future. Interesting that the problem was the OP’s email client or his ISP. It would be a good idea to offer a second method of obtaining the license such as a link in the email (as JH suggested) that could be used to download it directly if the ISP’s antivirus program stripped off the attachment thinking it was a virus.
As for the “shitfilter” I don’t like it. I’m American but I agree with Zyndstoff. At least the filter is not as bad as Dell’s filter in their forums. I have Dell machines for many years but I rarely post in their forums because of their filter that will reject the post if you have very mild explicatives or many other words that for some unfathomable reason Dell finds offensive. I didn’t love the excessive use of explicatives by mieko but I understood why and also realized that had I been in his shoes I might have done the same. I mean, Vlk, you guys don’t have any phone number for a paying customer with a problem like this to reach you quickly if support fails to respond quickly? That amazes me and not in a good way. I certainly hope you heed mieko’s final comment here about the need for Awil to address this issue quickly and seriously. The “unnamed” vendor (sorry, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to use another vendor’s name here) I have beta tested for over three years is finally opening an office in the USA this year. That is something Awil should consider as paying customers should have a way to reach the vendor via phone if needed and I’m sure Awil would like to expand usage of the paid versions in areas like the USA.
As for my using the unnamed vendor’s program on Vista because of some things I objected to in this thread/forum instead of using Avast, that is unlikely partly because I like Avast very much and also because I made the mistake of mentioning to the unnamed vendor’s beta support that I had installed Avast after being told by beta support that my computer was the cause of the many problems I had rather than the problems being due to bugs in the beta which I had reported. I mentioned that uninstalling the unnamed vendor’s beta product and installing Avast instead gave me back my vista virtual computer. It is like a new computer. Runs great now and is fast again and so far nary a problem with Avast. I was trying to illustrate for the unnamed vendor that the problems really were from that vendor’s beta since they all disappeared with Avast installed. The unnamed vendor I guess didn’t want to hear that as I was removed from beta testing for that vendor even though I was also testing the product on XP Pro and Windows 7 and did not remove it from those computers where it works well and did not ask to be removed from beta testing. Three years of giving freely of my time to test the unnamed vendor’s product with no compensation and they respond in such a childish way to my trying to get them to realize they have some serious problems with the beta on Vista. I am mentioning this only because it forced me to reconsider some of the criticism I made in this thread about this forum being “the wild west” that I didn’t approve of. Well, I’d much rather the “wild west” occasionally (you did state that threads like this don’t happen often) than dealing with a vendor who doesn’t appreciate its beta testers and acts like it has a stick up its rear end.
You are absolutely wrong mkis, I use Avast! 5 Free and I respect the product. But I am not impressed by the attitide this thread has delivered. I know this is a very good forum and I have no complaints againts anyone’s behaviour. I have no cause to be rude.
This is a lot off topic now, but it’s just like in the real world. If you rush in to some place with that kind of attitude, you can expect the other party to respond in a similar way. And even if they don’t show that to you, they’ll have that in mind or their subconscious. I work in a retail store and i often encounter such behavior. But in general we solve problems faster if the customer is calm and just tells us what the problem is instead of yelling at us and accusing us that we’re “thieving bastards” like in this case.
And i’ve also seen similar myself when i have a problem or a warranty resolving request, if i’m calm, the problems get solved much faster.
Just a thought…
Oh and for so many replies, it’s a natural thing in such forums for community to defend the program and it’s developers. Sometimes that’s bad (defending them when something is really wrong makes things even worse), but in general users try to cool down such situations.
And that’s what happened here.
@ Stran05 - you didn’t seem like you using the avast. I think I uttered the name of that not named brand. I shouldn’t have done that.
@ Mele20 - you couldn’t utter a swear word in yr sleep, honestly, how come you say that you might have done the same thing as Mieko. And was a bit was out of ordinary. I think everyone might have been bored or something. I dont really know. I worked out this problem computer yesterday that caught me by surprise, and I have to go and do something about it.
Since cazoza is a male, how is his avatar insulting to all women? ???
His avatar would be acceptable in the USA also … as it would be in most countries around the world … being that he is male.
Hopefully the last word here. I am the CEO here at Avast/Alwil. I have been lurking here watching this thread and also checking into the issue. While I do not agree with a lot of what was said here (especially the language and of course the title of the whole thread), you did have a very valid issue. Now, you did have a family pack license and an issue with converting it. As Igor says, that problem probably has its roots in an email client or spam filter somewhere. But the fact remains you did not get support from our support team when you should have. I do apologize for that.
We have looked into why that happened and the explanation is a bit interesting/revealing. Our support queue works on a FIFO (first in, first out) basis. Right now we have about a 24 hour turnaround on support tickets. Unfortunately, you were raising the ticket about twice every day. Each time you re-submitted, you went to the back of the queue. This went on for many days. Thus it took many days for your ticket to be answered–basically until a day passed without a ticket from you. Now, it would be better if our system were smarter and notice that your messages had not been replied to. But it is not. We will try and figure out how to change the system but it may not be easy.
As others can tell, we believe in pretty open communications. We do not attempt to censor this forum or our blogs–even when folks are negative about us. We do not plan on changing the philosophy. We do of course hope that folks will not flame others, use abusive language, abuse our volunteer moderators, or abuse the other users here that are just trying to help. We think that this approach is much better than the controlled environments that one sees in other forums. Of course, its success also depends on us all treating each other with respect.
So, as someone famous once said, “All’s well that ends well”. I thank you Mieko for bearing with us…and I thank everyone else on this thread for their passion.
Thank you. Your well thought out and reasonable response and the responses of the rest of Alwil team in this thread has just strengthened my conviction that I made the right choice in choosing avast! as my anti-virus program.
Suggestion about that work-ticket thing, since it sounds as if each re-submission in effect cancels previous ones and that’s primarily what got this mess going.
I’ve never (to the best of my memory, anyway) had problems with avast serious enough that they couldn’t be handled here in the forums, so I don’t have any personal experience with your work-ticket “machinery”.
In the few cases where I have needed official support, e.g. from places like eBay or Yahoo, I was immediately emailed a support-ticket reference number identifying my case, so that all correspondence relating to it would inter-relate.
If (a) avast users setting up an “official” complaint were strongly urged (or if necessary to make things work properly, required) to supply that reference number in all future correspondence, and if (b) your system could reasonably ensure that such reference number would save its place in the queue, I can see that as being most if not all of the solution.
There might be occasional awkward cases … for instance, a problem might turn out to be much different from what it originally looked like, and you might even need to issue a new ticket since you’d have to re-examine it almost from scratch. But hopefully you could somehow make allowance for the fact that you’d already spent time on it, so it wouldn’t drop back to the back of the queue again.
Just some thoughts from a retired “grunge detail” expert (industrial accountant).
Steckler - Thank you for taking the time to respond to this thread and explain the concept of how support tickets are handled. I think the Avast/Alwil organization and software is the best there is available. It’s just a shame you had to respond to an ignorant small person whose problem needed to be addressed. The bright side is that we all learned something from your post. ;D
steckler, I have to applaud your post here as being very professional… I don’t think of the OP as small-minded or anything, except being in a rage or overly angry. Who here has not done this themselves at one time or another? I don’t promote this kind of behavior, but understand why it happens sometimes…
:-[ :
>:( ;D 