Posts by Bruiser

Yeah, searching the forums is nice and all that; but maybe you don't know that you have to register and log in before you can read replies in a thread.

So after downloading CF, the new user has a good chance his AV will act up. Then he comes here, searches for something like "malware" or "trojan," and sees MAYBE a handful of threads. (If I remember I might have found around three or four mentioning this, some of them pretty outdated). So you click on one that says, at the top level, "my AV says 'trojan,' help, why trojan?" and the forthcoming replies are locked.

So a potential new CF member (who might have downloaded five or ten other Freelancer mods out of the dozens out there and is just toying around deciding which one to dedicate to) can either: a) go through the trouble of registering and then logging in, in the hopes of "getting to the bottom" of the possible false-positive -- or: b) say the hell with it and load up one of the other mods.

My whole point was that there should be a sticky or a notice right at the download page directly addressing this, saying something like "NOTICE: some antivirus software may give false positives. This is because their heuristic analyses blah blah blah...." If something like that was at the download page, right up-front, I would think that would be beneficial.

But hey, maybe I am nuts, maybe it's not a problem at all. Maybe nobody shies away after their AV throws a fit.

Hello,

A couple months ago I downloaded and installed CF 1.81, and was thinking about re-joining the community, as I used to come here years ago, under a different username for which I could not recover my password way back when.

Anyway, when I went to run the freelancer.exe, my Avira antivirus called out a trojan alert.

So, I uploaded freelancer.exe to virustotal.com and it produced 23 positives (out of 40 total packages used) for freelancer.exe. That's 23 out of 40.

While I certainly DO NOT believe CF 1.81 contains malware, you nevertheless have to wonder how many potential would-be members are justifiably deterred from playing Crossfire, due to all the malware warnings. Because -- to state the obvious -- an executable testing positive for malware with 23 out of 40 antivirus programs (57.5% positives) is NOT a "normal" thing.

To make things worse, the Crossfire site -- including this forum -- all but ignores this problem of what I assume are "false positives." There should be a STICKY or something, explaining that it's neither trojans nor any other malware, and explaining why the heuristics or whatever are seeing it as such. Pretending the flashing red lights and sirens do not exist -- hoping to "downplay" it by refusing to acknowledge it -- just makes it seem more suspicious. THAT is a BIG leap of faith for some folks.

Just sayin' ....