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Annoying popups


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Lately Malwarebytes has become increasingly more pushy in annoying me to upgrade. I get at least one pop-up a day telling me to upgrade to Malwarebytes premium, there's 20% off, there's summer sale, there's this, there's that.

I do not need the premium features at the moment, and I find it extremely annoying to have to continuously close annoying popups from Malwarebytes trying to sell me something which I don't need.

I understand that it is a free application and the revenue for the continuance of service comes from paying customers (I was one of them before my lifetime license got invalidated for some reason, and now there's only yearly subscriptions). You already get less features using the free version, and further annoying your users to try and get more money isn't the way forward for me, and I am seriously considering to stop using it, and stop recommending it to anyone, for this reason alone.

Most people I instantly convert to malwarebytes are people who had been affected by all sorts of adware and spamware, and they were getting these exact annoying popups on their machines, from all sorts of scammy websites. Now I cannot distinguish anymore Malwarebytes from these scammy websites, because the popups are just as annoying, just as frequent, and just as intrusive.

Now that I expressed my frustration towards this poor practice, I would constructively recommend that you add an option for users to disable if they do not wish to be notified about 'special deals' and 'sale, buy now before it runs out'.

I hope this reaches you, because I find Malwarebytes valuable enough, but if these popups keep interrupting my workflow I will kill it with fire.

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1 minute ago, user3241234 said:

That's besides the point, I already spent too long exchanging emails with your colleagues about that license a few years ago and it didn't go anywhere. I've accepted it and moved on, now if we can address the issue at hand please - removing the annoying popups.

Well at the current time, The pop ups are the cost of free. But in the free version, if you turn off (uncheck the start with Windows when you right click the system tray icon, and exit Malwarebytes after each scan) you should not see any pop ups.

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Thanks, so kill it with fire it is then, appreciate the transparency.

I agree with many when they say that Malwarebytes isn't what it once was, but now with shoving ads down people's throats for the price of 'free' - I thought limited features were the price of free? - you're making space for competitors to claim your unsatisfied users. Me leaving now won't mean anything to you, but as you've been bleeding customers for some time (hence the annoying popups), and will continue to do so, try and think back to where it all went wrong.

Anyway, I've uninstalled Malwarebytes, you may close the topic. I wish you well.

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1 minute ago, user3241234 said:

Anyway, I've uninstalled Malwarebytes, you may close the topic. I wish you well.

Did you not see the following?

13 minutes ago, Porthos said:

if you turn off (uncheck the start with Windows when you right click the system tray icon, and exit Malwarebytes after each scan) you should not see any pop ups.

 

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I'm a longtime user and have a lifetime license from a retail box purchase years ago.  In the last two weeks on multiple occasions I've gotten popups related the privacy vpn.  This comes from the taskbar, when I open the software I often get a screen about the browser plugin.  Very annoying!  Running 4.2.0....

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3 minutes ago, gotogordon said:

In the last two weeks on multiple occasions I've gotten popups related the privacy vpn.  This comes from the taskbar, when I open the software I often get a screen about the browser plugin.  Very annoying!

 

2 minutes ago, gotogordon said:

just saw the thread below and shocked to see this is intentional for premium users!

But note this post in the thread.

 

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I had to permanently turn off the ads/trackers setting because of all the valid sites that were having problems. 

Still using the other protections although I still see too many sites being blocked, in my opinion.  I wish they would block sites based on actual problems rather than globally blocking TLD's which are often valid.  I am getting tired of having to whitelist them or asking MB to whitelist them.

Edited by BillH99999
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1 minute ago, BillH99999 said:

I wish they would block sites based on actual problems rather than globally blocking TLD's which are often valid.

Unfortunately given the high frequency of abuse of alternate TLDs across the web by scammers and malware distributors, blocking them all by default and whitelisting based on user reports is the only way to dynamically block the constantly emerging new/unknown malicious sites and servers.  It is definitely over aggressive, but sadly the bad guys are just as aggressive (and generating/switching to new domain names is cheap and easy, with many malicious sites and servers having such a short lifespan that trying to block them as they are discovered often ends up being pointless as many such sites are pulled down/replaced in the time it takes to report and block them).  Behavior based solutions are best when possible, such as is the case for blocking tech support scam sites, but trying to block all malware/malicious sites this way doesn't work because most don't have such identifiable behaviors to block them that way.

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  • Root Admin

Hi @BillH99999

Well I must say that I don't visit anywhere near the amount of sites that I used to but I still do visit a lot of them and I certainly have not been running into issues requiring adjustment for myself. I've had a few False Positives and have reported them and typically they're taken care of the same day and often within an hour or less in some cases.

I too actually wrote an extensive internal letter seeking to remove the top-level blocks. However after working with the Research Team and seeing the sheer amount of bad sites vs. good sites it became obvious that for some of the TLD that more than 80% of all sites created were for nefarious reasons and needed to be blocked.

Just curious if visiting so many different sites is part of your job duties or just personal surfing. Speaking for myself I also quickly disable the plugin if needed and I don't have time to report it, then re-enable it. I'd rather it block a rare valid site than miss it and possibly have some type of drive-by attempt.

 

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