how do you avoid google exe not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous and Norton

how do you avoid google exe not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous and Nortons reputation complaint when making my exes available for download from my website

I believe that Google considers any exe file dangerous, zipped or not, because it's easiest to execute nasty stuff from an exe file. It's just a simple, safety precaution. They're saying, "It's up to you, it's not our fault if you get burned." Another possibility, considering google's search abilities, is that they actually track how often files are downloaded, and they note if it is an uncommon/unproven download. Just a guess.

As far as Norton goes, some anti-virus programs, if these forums can be believed, register "false positives." This means that Norton thinks your Klik product looks like a virus, when it isn't. I believe that they have been notified of this, and simply don't care. The other option is that Clickteam is evil, but I just don't want to believe that one. I suppose that you could warn people about this on your site. You could also become the CEO of Google and change their policy.

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'Nuff said.

Grim_Jester - That's not how Google works when it displays viral warnings. It is based purely on website information Google has of the URL the download (specifically domain). If it's a new domain this will be the case until it has ~10-20 downloads without any reports.

Norton is pathetic, your only hope with them is to keep submitting false positives...

Or sue Norton for marking your program as a virus when it's not. :P

Thanks, Danny. That's good to know.

Happygreenfrog, I believe that Clickteam has notified them of this problem before, and they just ignore it. Clickteam should actively support another virus scanner as payback.

There is a difference in notifying Norton and suing them. Suing them will make them try to do a better job of not marking things that aren't viruses as viruses. Notifying them will just make them know, and they seem to ignore false positive notifications, so it won't work. They really have hurt the sales of legit programs by marking things that aren't viruses as viruses, and by ignoring all reports of those programs being a false positive. That is a legitimate reason to sue them, if you ask me. Just my opinion on the matter.

Put the exe in zip or rar file before linking to it.

We can't blame Norton alone though. Sure, it's their mistake to flag MMF2 programs as false positives and it hurts us. However, part of the reason this happens is the "compress runtime" option which extracts an executable, puts it in a temporary folder, and runs it. This is the behavior can easily be mistaken for a typical trojan. The damage is unfortunately already done since this feature was implemented and enabled by default, but I hope it's done right in MMF3; do not extract and execute another file upon application start.

Oh, and don't use rar RhysD ;) It's proprietary so the support and usage will always be limited regardless of how popular it gets. zip for compatibility, 7z for strong compression.

It's not just applications that have the "Compress runtime" option checked that it thinks are a virus, though. It thinks just about any MMF2-made game is a virus. Depending on the version of Norton, it sometimes even thinks that parts of MMF2 are a virus. I myself use Kaspersky, not Norton. ;)