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[Vivalas]

Alright, so I'm officially done with antivirus programs fucking with indie games, it's almost like there is a AAA conspiracy or something.

Webroot is utter garbage, Avira turns your computer into a potato, and Bitdefender just took a massive shit on my save, gobbled all my unit files, and then corrupted my soundsense installation.

In case you use Bitdefender like I do, I would advise you to prematurely exclude your DF install from it, before it does likewise to you. However I am done with it and will now promptly uninstall it for this nonsense. Real time security has always done nothing but piss me off.

[Vivalas]

Yes, until you nuked my fort for no reason 

[Greiger]

Wow they sure do make you feel bad for uninstalling don't they.

It is sadly a common thing among antivirus stuff, the antivirus that is more likely to locate harmful things is also the antivirus that will have more false positives.  Indie games like dwarf fortress don't have a massive number of folks reporting false positives like triple a games do.  I know a couple big company games I was in betas for that got flagged by antivirus stuff just like DF did, just because they were not around long enough to get flagged as OK yet.  Could be worse, back in the early days of DFHack it was flagged by almost every antivirus out there just because it was doing suspicious things to another program's memory space.

A good message to all as you said always be sure to whitelist your indie games once you are sure they are harmless.  (Oh and make sure you still have SOME kind of antivirus on there after removing it.  That stuff is important)

[Vivalas]

What makes it worse is exclusions seem to not work and turning off real time protection... doesn't turn off real time protection. Bitdefender also does a wierd thing where it stops you from copying files back to a certain location after a quarantine.. so I had to re download all of soundsense..

[jecowa]

Are these antiviral programs deleting saves on their own without prompting the user for permission?

[Vivalas]

Not deleting, quarantining. For some reason though I corrupted my entire soundsense install. Unit files for my saves were recoverable, thankfully.

Oh, and did I mention that it lacks the interface of checkboxes most antivirus programs have? So instead of unquarantining all but a few other actually suspicious files, I just had to go one by one.

[funkydwarf]

Windows defender is fine and free and stays mostly out of the way.

[CABL]

Windows defender is fine and free and stays mostly out of the way.

Nah, it's garbage. It doesn't recognize browser hijackers. OP should use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, which is extremely good against malware/viruses and marks something harmless as malware only if it's pirated stuff. Fairly good performance as well. The only bad experience I had with MAM, is that some user avatars on this forums considered dangerous.

[chevil]

Bitdefender is garbage.
I used it for a day and I had bunch of weird problems while it was installed.
Like being unable to watch youtube videos with my adblocker active.

[SmileyMan]

Nah, it's garbage. It doesn't recognize browser hijackers. OP should use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, which is extremely good against malware/viruses and marks something harmless as malware only if it's pirated stuff. Fairly good performance as well. The only bad experience I had with MAM, is that some user avatars on this forums considered dangerous.

MBAM all day, every day, for me. And I've been using AV programs since the Norton DOS days

[Vivalas]

I have MBAV and was using Bitdefender as well

[funkydwarf]

Well yes, use a spyware scanner such as malware bytes or superantispyware in addition.  But they dont cover old school virii. You need something for that, and Windows defender is fine for that. No "antivirus" I have found actually allows you to not use malware bytes or a malware scasnner of some sort in addition.

[Bortness]

What makes it worse is exclusions seem to not work and turning off real time protection... doesn't turn off real time protection. Bitdefender also does a wierd thing where it stops you from copying files back to a certain location after a quarantine.. so I had to re download all of soundsense..

Huge-company software development teams are almost universally abject liars who would skin their own children alive for one more downloadable sale - this goes triple for "anti"virus developers, whose software more often than not acts more like a virus than the stuff its intended to eradicate.  As soon as you install their software, they treat your computer system like they own it.

I do not understand why anyone would ever allow such ridiculous malware on their machine - much less pay for it, which is like giving money to someone for the service of beating you senseless with a table leg.

I absolutely guarantee that the registry entries and other bits and pieces of Bit"Defender" will never be gone from your system until you format zeroes to the hard drive and reinstall everything from the ground up.  These development teams and their virus software are leeches, and should be eradicated as such.

Note that I refer to the dev TEAMS as a whole unit, not the individual people involved.  It is a common phenomenon to see groups of people acting poorly together in ways that the associated individuals would not.

/ rant

[Vivalas]

Hah, I feel the same way some times, though not as, er... genocidal 

I don't think Bitdefender is as bad as beasts like McAfee or Norton however. It was relatively low profile except when updating and never bothered me to go premium. It also blocked a ton of bad websites that I didn't need to be linked too. Compared to horror stories from Norton (regarding the fact they have their own cleanup tool for their own software) and McAfee (where on an older computer from 2003 I couldn't even get it to boot without crashing if I didn't update McAfee), Bitdefender was great... except it was just too touchy.

The interface is piss simple and easy to use. Want to scan a file or folder? Just drag and drop. Great. But the settings are as vague and plain as a piece of paper (literally consisting of like... 3 buttons), and the toggle for real time protection sometimes just flipped back magically, sometimes from input lag... other times I'm unsure. I really didn't have issues with over sensitivity before either. Just wierder memory / binary editors an antivirus would naturally be concerned about and things like Sandboxie-- but when you screw with my dorfs I must uninstall you. The biggest problem really was just that when it decided to quarantine / blacklist something, even after adding exclusions and restoring and everything else, it just never seemed to gain back trust or let you use the program in question again.

So yes software firms are scummy, but I don't think Bitdefender is THAT bad. It would be fine, for example, for a far-less computer savvy individual who wants free and up to date protection and who doesn't game much or do any programming or other computer work that requires tools that anti virus gets spastic towards.

[deathpunch578]

if you are still in need of an antivirus that doesn't fuck with games I recommend avast, it keeps a list of games you have installed on your computer and does not mess with any of the game files (it does recognize DF and a bunch of other indie games as actual games and not a system threat)