lmacri wrote:
delphinium wrote:
We asked several times for a separate forum, but were denied, partly due to liability questions, partly to do with the fact that Symantec charges for malware removal, and partly because an entire forum should not rely on one individual.
Hi everyone, and thanks for all the great feedback.
Here's my main concern. If a user is already paying $99 US online for a one-year subscription for N360 Premier and their system becomes infected with malware, why should they be charged an additional fee for having that malware removed from their system or be re-directed to another forum for help?
[...]
Perhaps an alternative would be for Norton to include access to the 'Norton Virus Removal Assurance' service as a basic feature of the product. At the current $8.99 for access to 'unlimited virus removals' for the duration of the subscription, it's not going to have that much of an impact on the overall product purchase price.
Norton's basic purpose (regarding malware) is to keep the nasties from getting on your system; as we all know, once they've got themselves entrenched on a machine, the installed Norton (or anybody else's) product isn't going to do much good. So that (plus, for 360, the backup and utilities functions--and for Premier, the additional 23GB of online backup space) is what our $99 subscription is paying for. And with a little safe computing knowledge & practice, it's all most of us are going to need. So rather than making everybody's subscription cost cover the cost of recruiting and training an army of people like Quads, Norton keeps the basic subscription cost down, but offers folks who are especially concerned that they might play host to a nasty the option to pay for some "insurance"; one of the strengths of this approach (besides keeping the cost for the rest of us down) is that the number of people choosing to buy that "insurance" gives them a rough, forward-looking metric for forecasting how many malware removal experts they ought to employ and train.
Sure, there's some intuitive appeal to the idea that if Norton's product "fails" and a nasty slips by, then Norton ought to provide the help to clean it up as a service, a sort of warranty. But as we here also know too well, there are an awful lot of users who will override their security software--even if they have to come here to ask somebody how to do it!--so they can download or run a program, or access a website, which they "know" is safe. And, with millions of users, there are bound to be "a few" who--either by sheer bad luck or because they're out there browsing some unsavory parts of the web looking for bargains, porn, or the like--are going to cross paths with the latest and greatest code that our malware-writing adversaries have produced, before anybody else has discovered it and written it into the definitions or behaviors that Norton can look for.
If Norton is going to bulk up its staff with experienced veterans of the malware wars with the training and the wisdom not to render a lot of peoples' PCs unbootable--and then insure themselves against the occasional human mistake that somebody might sue them to pay for--well, that costs money, which has to come from somewhere. So at some point, we have to ask ourselves--on behalf of all the millions of users like us whom we're looking out for--do we really want to all have to subsidize that for the folks I described in the preceding paragraph...or would justice dictate they pay for it themselves, with a little extra "premium" or a $99 "consult fee"?
Honestly, though, I'm not cold-hearted enough to completely answer my own question with the latter--which is why I'm glad that, just as we have so many good folks here who are willing to volunteer their time to help users keep their Norton protection humming so they'll never have a malware infection, there are also so many good people out there on those other free forums, who maybe don't care to spend their time on subscription issues and folks trying to run plain, ordinary backups (etc.) but are happy to put their formal malware removal training and years of proven expertise to work digging nasties out at the root(kit). 
So I guess my bottom line (finally, eh?) is that I think the current approach makes a lot of sense.
Posted from Motorola Xoom
It wasn't the amount of removals I was doing by logging and scripting for the individual PC or at times just the trying to keep up with where I was up to and the hours and hours,
I didn't mind, just took a fair bit of energy drink
It was the fact in this open forum, people would tell the user to install or run everything but the kitchen sink, which could make things worse, harder to remove, or start telling the user to run tools I was using, but yet they didn't know how how to properly use the tools, know what they were looking at or how to script / fix a problem if it occurs.
Other times I would be half way through removal and waiting for the user reply, I would be offline. another user would jump in saying do this do that. GEEZ, made things harder.
So I decided it's not a good idea to do advanced removal on a open forum and I can see why removal forums have protection in place.
I don't (didn't) care about kudos and the Solved I care(d) that the users PC was correctly and completely clean without losing data or damaging the system further.
Quads
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