Soooo, Avast have bean on a down hill slope for a long time now, but in the last ~6 months it has become THE major source of SPAM on my system and the no:1 source of annoying and unwanted messages. Holy crap, even Yahoo in its worst days back in the late 90s were´nt even close to being as as intrusive as Avast is today!
Yes, it´s free and I´m free to use it, and I have, for ~10 years and it has been working just fine, but lately…if I want a Big Brother to watch over my shoulder and to give me bad advice every day I would ask a Big Brother to do just that…and I could tell him to shout the f… up when I wanted him to…but not the interface to Avast…!
One more fu…in annoying pop up message, (which will appear with in 5 minutses…) and I am uninstalling this Adware, and installing one of the better free alternatives wich don´t shove advertising in your face every 30 minutes!
It´s been good for 10 years, but holy crap, it´s gone down hill lately!
I rarely see much in the way of popup or UI promotions, a.k.a. ads, one a day perhaps. But every 30 minutes, no way.
So I don’t know how you have your avast installed or why it has changed if you have been using it for 10 years. The popups and UI offers/promotions, etc. started around two years ago if memory serves me well.
I would suggest that you do a custom install and only install the functions that you require, there are some functions that whiles limited to avast free users will be generating offers (I guess). You can also do a minimal installation and that is generally the main shields (excluding the mail shield).
It really depends on where you are on the web (or other places off the web), if you keep to main stream sites as CNN, Yahoo and such, there will be very few pop ups.
If you go to more interesting places there will be an abundance of pop ups that says: we see what you are doing…we can protect you… and so on.
I choose the sites I visit, and do´nt ask Avast to tell me that someone else can see what I visit, that is MY choice!
If I wanted Avast to treat me as a 5 year old (after using it for 10+ years) I would like to have a choice to regret my choice and opt out!
As I said earlier, I´m ~one pop up from leaving Avast all together, and it´s just for the f-ckin pop ups that targets their messages to what sites I am visiting at the moment, Big Brother… Not really, but little brother is getting really f-cking annoying by telling me every 30 minutes that I´m not visiting an Avast approved site!
I’m an avast user like yourself as is Eddy we are not employed by avast, just trying to find a way to limit what promotions/offers/ads, etc. I thought you came to the support forums for help.
Getting rid of the elements that you don’t want in a custom install is a way of doing that. After your expansion of where the ads are appearing, I would suspect that it is the Privacy element, SecureLine VPN function that may be generating the popups. This element can be uninstalled in the same way as other elements.