Hey. Before I get into this, I'd just like to say thanks for creating a free antivirus solution. It was a great product, and it gave me great peace of mind until recently. Now I don't know if it's still a great product or not, because I don't know if my system's still protected or not.



I get this message every time I try to update. I have 0.88.5 installed, and according to the https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/18/46/ download page, 0.88.5 is the current version.

At https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/10/27/ , it says "0.88.6 is the current version," but there is no download link. I'm confused. If 0.88.6 isn't out yet, how can 0.88.6 be the current version?

If this is some kind of marketing gimick to get people to register/donate, you should at least supply a link in the message at https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/10/27/ so we can give you our money.

If that's not what this is about, please explain it better. The message at https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/10/27/ doesn't make any sense to me. Or, rather, it seems to be giving conflicting messages. "Your system is unprotected! Don't Panic! You need to update! No update is availible!"

Please pick a message and stick to it. If you want money, ask for money. But don't beat around the bush with confusing, conflicting, vaguely threatening update messages, while not supplying the update. That's just bad form.

ClamWin uses the signature database from the ClamAV project (primarily used by Linux email servers). ClamAV updates its the signatures and periodically issues upgrades for the ClamAV product. The ClamWin team tries to issue its own upgrades for the ClamWin product shortly after the ClamAV team issues their upgrades. If you go to the links mentioned in the ClamWin messages, they explain that ClamAV has updated its product and that the ClamWin developers are working on an update for ClamWin and will have it out soon.

The message you get in ClamWin after the signature updates mentions that your ClamWin functionality is 9 out of a possible 10. Nine isn't bad, and the hardworking ClamWin team will have their upgrade out soon.

Regards,

Some explanation :

When the ClamAV team released version 0.88.6 of the clamav scanning engine, we immediately began working on the release of ClamWin 0.88.6. For the first time alch wasn't there to do the release, so it was kind of a mess. Finally we agreed to postpone the release of 0.88.6, since the new version clamav scanning engine doesn't add any functionality or bugfixes that would have consequences for Windows users anyway.
We are now testing ClamWin 0.88.6, which will be able to kill a process if it has loaded a virus into memory, so the virus can be removed. Once that functionality is fully tested, you will be able to download a new release.

The message saying that the latest version of ClamWin 0.88.6 is probably a leftover from the mess we had when trying to force the release, sorry for the confusion.

I hope this will ensure you ClamWin is still as great as before, even though the clamav scanning engine that is included is the second-to-latest version.

budtse

Well it's not just that and I'd disagree that there was/is a mess. The page https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/10/27/ clearly says that ClamAV releqased 0.88.6 engine and we will release the updated version soon and post an announcement on the home page.

We could have released the 0.88.6 update the following day despite me being on holidays. However the 0.88.6 clamav update did not bring anything important to the code used in clamwin, therefore we decided to wait until process killing feature is implemented and tested and release afterwards. We will beging testing tomorrow and release on the weekend.

I see. Thank you all for the explaination. I apologize for the tone in my initial post. My confusion stems from the fact that I hadn't heard of ClamAV before, so I didn't realize ClamWin and ClamAV were two seperate products. All I knew was, my product was telling me about some updates that I couldn't download.

Generally I'd agree, 9 out of 10 ain't bad. I just didn't know what 9 out of 10 actually meant. Nine out of ten what? It sounds like you're saying that extra 1 is some scanning engine changes that are "nothing important," plus process-killing. I guess I can wait for that.

In the past it's been my experience that when free software tells me "You're currently getting 9 out of 10 of this product's features," it's usually followed by "click here to send us money and we'll give you 10 out of 10." So I was confused and a little irritated that this particular piece of software seemed to be implying.

I didn't realize that ClamWin development was tied to the development cycle of another product, and I hadn't noticed that the link was pointing me at ClamAv news rather than ClamWin. It's hosted at the ClamWin domain name, after all, and ClamWin told me about it. I admit, I haven't been following the development of this product at all. It's just something I downloaded, you know? I click "Download the latest version" when it tells me to. You can immagine how this "WARNING" message suddenly popping up one day could easily confuse a windows-user.