I was minding my own business playing WordsByPost yesterday - when Avast displayed a popup. I didn’t read it closely and have already forgotten what it said. I clicked on it to acknowledge that I’d seen it and suddenly found that I couldn’t play the game any more. Any time I try to launch it, I see the splash screen for a moment, then it disappears. I’m in the middle of at least 8 separate games of WordsByPost (a clone of Scrabble) and would like to get back to them. What do I need to do?
I’ve been through the GUI and can’t find any access to logs nor can I find any list of blocked programs. I’ve run the Smart Scan and it shows nothing wrong on my system. I’m using the Free Antivirus 2015 version of Avast on Windows 8.1.
I don’t know why it is blocking WordsByPost. I’ve been playing it without incident for at least a couple of years now. All my other programs work fine, including games that need internet connections.
Right click on the avast tray icon and select ‘Show last popup message’ - this is only available for the last popup - if you have rebooted or had another popup since the one of interest, you can’t display it.
The splash screen only comes up for a moment and has no message of any kind on it; it looks completely like a normal startup for the game.
Would Avast have written a useful message to its logs? Is there some way for me to access the logs? I’m disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be any way to use the GUI to find and view the logs but I’m hoping they are still being written and can be accessed some way. Otherwise, if that functionality has been moved to the paid product, I will probably need to move to a better free product…
Just in case anyone else has this problem down the road, I managed to solve the problem.
After not hearing any further responses on this thread, I did some nosing around. I was unable to find any Avast logs - maybe the free Avast doesn’t generate them?? - but I went into Windows and locked in its logs for application issues. I found a message that said one particular file making up Words By Post was missing; that’s apparently why it wouldn’t go beyond the splash screen. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app and everything is fine again now.
I’m not completely sure but I think it was Avast that deleted the file that Words By Post was missing. The game had been losing connection frequently in the few minutes before the problem began (for no good reason since I was home and sitting right beside the router). The popup identified some kind of problem. I just clicked OK or whatever the button was that acknowledged I’d read the message but I was immediately unable to play.
I’m not sure what was going on under the covers but perhaps Words By Post was automatically updating itself and Avast detected a problem with one of the files in the update and blocked it or deleted it, rendering Words By Post unplayable?? Just an educated guess. I’ve never updated Words By Post and I don’t know if it has some kind of automatic update cycle that might have been running at that moment. I also don’t know if Avast would routinely delete a file in an update if it detected a problem with it; that seems like a reasonable response.
I’m VERY disappointed that there was apparently no way to access the Avast logs to see what was going on. In my opinion, that should have been the obvious place to dig for more information. Perhaps this is Avast’s way of coaxing people away from the free product: moving critical functionality to the paid version so that you are practically forced to upgrade. If that is the case, I am NOT impressed. This is more likely to drive me to try someone else’s free product than to buy Avast’s paid product.
Anyway, that’s all I’ll say on that. I just wanted to record how I’d resolved the problem for posterity’s sake.