Shoutbox

Remove the adware from Messenger Plus and quit whining. I am sure Patchou does not run the adware program himself as no sane person would install it willingly.

There are tons of possibilities to make some money without bothering computer illiterates with a popup and banner fest.

Messenger plus is a nice program really, but this adware spoils the fun.

Yeah sure there will be people responding "I have installed it to support Pathou!". Enjoy the popups

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Originally posted by arnoud
Enjoy the popups

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Roger that Captain.

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Originally posted by arnoud
Remove the adware from Messenger Plus and quit whining.

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As I said somewhere before*, that wouldn't solve a thing in this case. The fact is that MSAS has bugs in it. And the purpose of the petition is to fix those bugs.

Even if Plus! didn't had a sponsor, MSAS will still be the same with all its bugs and false alerts. It wouldn't be the first time that a company sues MSAS for not willing to fix wrong detections, it happened before and it is happening all over again, with a Plus! sponsor or not...

EDIT: * it was here

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Originally posted by arnoud
There are tons of possibilities to make some money without bothering computer illiterates with a popup and banner fest.

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This comment pops up from time to time, rightfully and understandable... But the truth is, in all those years, nobody has come up with anything which could replace the sponsor. The sponsor can't be compared to some random google ad you might wanna put on a website and as you often see on smaller sites. The costs involving Plus! (the high-volume servers, forums, support, 24/7 full time programming job, etc...) aren't to be underestimated and can't be covered by some google ads. It wasn't a light decision which was taken, just like that...



EDIT: As Guido has posted:

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(Thanks for knowing how to mantain a civilized conversation and discuss your points kindly; you are in the minority)

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arnoud, indeed, it has been a while since we had somebody with a different point of view who also could maintain a civilized convo without bursting into flaming and name calling

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Originally posted by arnoud
There are tons of possibilities to make some money without bothering computer illiterates with a popup and banner fest.

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Patchou is patiently waiting for your super ideas. Ah, be sure to check all the threads in which he has posted about the sponsor program and the possible alternatives so that you know what has already been taken into account.

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Originally posted by AlohaSlick
Guido, you are ABSOLUTLEY correct. Now let's get down into the real world and try to solve a problem.  Microsoft has no particular interest in giving us tools to remove adware. It is in business to make money. Until we understand this is NOT about what is fair or just but rather who is in control, Mr. Gates and his cohorts are likely to prevail and Plus is likely to be relegated to the junk heep of great things that stepped on the giant's toes and suffered the inevitable consequences.

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(Thanks for knowing how to mantain a civilized conversation and discuss your points kindly; you are in the minority)

I agree with you in many points, but I think it's worth the try. There is no way a shareware program would give Patchou the salary he deserves (just think of piracy for 3 milliseconds); and as for donation, Patchou already knows how that works ($100 in 1 year IIRC)

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
the reason why it was removed is because it isn't so wise that 20000 people start to mail MSAS out of the blue.

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I can certainly understand that.  It does make sense that 20000 emails would be overwhelming.  (However I don't recall that as being part of the forum policy)

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
As we all know, not everybody can write decent formal mails like it is required in this case. Also mailing it to the wrong department, or even using the wrong mail form from their site can cause the opposite effect.

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This is very true, which is why I asked them to be respectful.  I probably should have said more about making sure that you state the problem correctly, basically exactly as patchou has stated, but in their OWN words.  Also, I specifically provided the email address so that people would not send it to the wrong dept.

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
It is far better to compile everything together and that only 1 person sends it. This also reduces the huge amount of overhead that the mail department would otherwise recieve, again, resulting in the opposite effect...

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I think that the two together would be a far better "weapon" to drive the point home to the MSAS team.  Perhaps just the Beta Testers and other select individuals should email MSAS.  Basically, only those that take the time to do it right.

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
Also, not everybody is willing to compose a decent mail with a big formal explanation, fill out all the required fields and send it like that. On the other hand, much more people are willing to fill out a simply mailing form as shown in the petition.

And, as said, not everybody (as you can read from several posts and on several forums) can tell in the correct words what this is about or do it in a decent manner either.

A petition is a much better way in such cases.

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They would rather listen to 1 person who gathered a petition in a professional way, then reading 20000 random mails, as the later can be seen as pestering and mass spamming....

This is also how most companies would react...

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Personally I think that many emails (however 20,000 is probably a bit much) would just support the petition and give it more legitimacy to the MSAS team.  Personally I did not expect ALL of the MsgPlus users to email MSAS about it.  I expected that only those who felt passionate enough and could take the time to do it right would actually email MSAS.  I probably should have said something like that.

Also speaking as someone who works for a software development company, typically when more customers complain about something, we work more quickly to resolve that problem, as opposed to when someone says that a bunch of people have this problem.



I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.

Shaggie

I think that a physical letter would have a lot more standing than e-mails. E-mails can be sent without any thaught, but a letter at least shows that a little more effort has been put into it.

Personally, I think patchou giving a pdf file for us to download, print, sign and send would have an even bigger effect.

I am one of those unfortunate people, who could not have the sponsored version, as my anti-virus saw it as spyware, but as soon as I installed it sponsor free, if you get what I mean, I have had no problems.

Smilies from smiliecentral.com, is another one I could not install, despite being 100% spyware free. Wonder if MSAS sees it as spyware too. Smiliecentral know about this and I have written to my anti-virus company.

Why is it that companies set anitspyware to see some things as spyware when they are not and there is no way of making it possible to accept these softwares etc?

I don't know about anyone else but I once recieved the following chain-email:

>MSN is planning to take away MSN Messenger by September 14th,
>2005. If you want to keep our MSN Messanger free of charge, send
>this
>email to everyone you know. It will be used as a petition. Each person you
>send this to counts as one signature" If this petition gets
>500,000 signatures they will keep MSN Messenger. If they do not receive
>500,000 votes you will have to pay £5.00
>to have Messenger (per month). If you don't care about this then please
>for everyone's sake help out a little. Thank you for your time and
>consideration
>and please help MSN beat their vote

I ignored it for about 50 good reasons.  One such reason was that as far as I'm aware, you can't actually petetion a company, only a government. Ok, so MSN do govern my life to some extent, but that's not the point, the point is that they have no obligation to care about this whole thing, so perhaps you should use a different approach -remember how MSN is about competetion... it's their weakness.

That sounds like a spam e-mail, and if I received one such e-mail, would not reply to it, the best thing is to bin it. MSN will not get rid of MSN Messenger, that seems absurd, when so many people use it.

They would have to give people plenty of notice if they were going to start charging people for the use of their software, but £5.- per month is pretty steep in my view, as many people do not have a lot of money and use such software as a means of communication, keeping in touch with friends and family. £.5- per year is not so bad though, but from what I read that was supposed to be per month, how utterly ridiculous.

If there were to be any changes, we would all hear about it from MSN and with plenty of warning, I would think.

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Originally posted by SirronTheMighty
I don't know about anyone else but I once recieved the following chain-email:

>MSN is planning to take away MSN Messenger by September 14th,
>2005. If you want to keep our MSN Messanger free of charge, send
>this
>email to everyone you know. It will be used as a petition. Each person you
>send this to counts as one signature" If this petition gets
>500,000 signatures they will keep MSN Messenger. If they do not receive
>500,000 votes you will have to pay £5.00
>to have Messenger (per month). If you don't care about this then please
>for everyone's sake help out a little. Thank you for your time and
>consideration
>and please help MSN beat their vote

I ignored it for about 50 good reasons.  One such reason was that as far as I'm aware, you can't actually petetion a company, only a government. Ok, so MSN do govern my life to some extent, but that's not the point, the point is that they have no obligation to care about this whole thing, so perhaps you should use a different approach -remember how MSN is about competetion... it's their weakness.

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That is a chain letter... it is not a petition at all!

Of course microsoft will never listen to that as it will never be recieved in the first place. Mails can not be monitored like that at all. How is MS going to know when 500,000 mails have been send? They can't, mail doesn't work that way.

This mail is just a very old typical chain letter scam.

And all this particular mail will do is making mailing servers slow down because of the increased traffic it creates, nothing more.

PS: And you can petition a company. It is even more done than petitioning a goverment...