Intrusive Spam Like, Pop-up Commercial

I have no idea who in their right mind decided to approve and implement commercial pop-ups on a fully paid piece of software?

nowhere did I approve or at least intended you to have this right or option. This is the behaviour of the lowest kind of software makers. You have the perfectly good option of emailing me your upgrade offers, not to have a pop screen show up, un-asked for 5 times on my system in the last two day.

I have been a paying user of BD for over 4 years and purchased about 7 product versions. Not only each version have minimised any customizability I had over scan tasks complexity and schedules; having settings that reset themselves after every upgrade or reset; a million upgrade attempts a day instead of limiting it to my own number - but now you have spam pop-ups on my system? (and not for the first time)

This is the last straw, I won't be renewing BD anymore.

Agreed - it's insulting at best.

The ludicrous thing is that after I moved to The New Bitdefender (I wonder what the next version will be called....) is the pop up ads continued.

Thankfully I suspect someone had the sense to include a counter to determine when the customer had been sufficiently annoyed and the advert has been ceased to encourage me to go elsewhere. This is a consideration for when I come to renew BitDefender.

AndyH - I think this may have been implemented as a literal interpretation of an overinflated marketing mans instruction by an aggrieved ex-developer who had already determined his exit plan.

@ AndyH, @ tomj777

Your feedback is appreciated, and will be directed to the appropriate team for review, to enable us to improve our support and services.

To remove your email address from the in product messaging (IPM) list please send me a PM with the email you used to create a MyBitdefender account and your Bitdefender license key. Your key and the address for MyBitdefender are visible after clicking the link displaying the number of days left, in the bottom line of the installed product.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Hi Georgia,

Thank you for responding.

I don't think it's necessary to remove me from push advert... the first time I saw it, I was inspired to replace 2013 with New BitDefender / 2014.

Admittedly, I would have preferred to have received an email informing me...

However, it was just a little odd to then see the same advert (after all, I was by this time running the advertised product).

Then I saw it again...

And again...

My conclusion - it would have been a fine pop-up to see once informing me that there was a new version.

Phrased as an advert to purchase something I already have (i.e. a license which works across product revisions) wasn't a great idea.

To see it repeated after the pop-up was dismissed was, to be frank, damaging to Bit Defenders reputation.

I'm afraid that if this was a considered approach then tough questions need to be asked about and within the team.

In the Android mobile enviorment, there is something called "Icon Ads" - perhaps the appropriate team can learn from the user backlash from these.

See airpush.com, leadbolt.com, senddroid.com and startapp.com

In the Windows environment, well, look at some of the malware behaviour that BitDefender protects us against - those splash adverts are also symptomatic of said malware.

In the Android space, my abhorrence to noise generated by adverts leads me to block at every opportunity (I also ensure I purchase or donate to developers otherwise reliant upon an advertising business model). I'm not alone.

@Georgia

I just wanted to jump in here with a "me too". I have over 200 days left on my license, and the annoying ad-screen pops up every day.....

Hi guys...just updated 2 of 5 machines to "Photon 2014" but I haven't seen any popup adds ? Where are these coming from and at what point do they "pop up" ?

Agreed fully that for a paid subscription to anything you shouldn't be plagued with advertising popups at any time !!

TiminAz