I have to admit I got tricked too because I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t notice it popped up a “please install crapware on my computer” dialog immediately over top of the PDF Creator installer.
Just for giggles I went back and re-ran the whole process and there is NO INDICATION anywhere that it will ask you to install anything other than the application you requested on the download page or anywhere in the installer. I even followed through the advanced install and not once did it tell me it would do this until it popped up the other installer on top at the same spot after I had already told it to go ahead and install PDF Creator. This time I was watching for it and saw what it was doing, but the Bill of Materials on the final page of the PDF Creator installer had no indication it would attempt to install anything other than PDF Creator. Then it immediately follows that up with a request to install crapware before proceeding with the install of the application I want.
I find the lack of notice anywhere in the installer that this will happen disingenuous at best and outright nasty at worst. It should be indicated in the installer that it comes with “offers” or whatever you wish to call them and have a clearly labeled panel that allows the user to opt out of the “offers” before it ever attempts to install them. Further, under no circumstances should the option to install this other software ever block the installation of what you really wanted to install.
Your software is exceptionally useful and I would be happy to pay you money for a licensed version that didn’t pull this sort of trickery. You guys are hurting the reputation of your program by not being up front about what you are doing in the installer so that the user can be well informed. Many other applications approach this properly by giving you the option on the downloads page to include the “offers” or download a clean version or have a panel in the installer that lets you opt out of the “offers”. If you follow this best practice many of your customers will be happy to spread the word and your application will grow. This is something for you guys to own up to and not something you can push back on your partners.
Thanks
For the record: I installed v1.5.1
Hello PDF Forge team,
I installed an update to PDF Creator today and it installed the Snap.do malware and spyware toolbar along with the software. This toolbar is known to be malicious and hijacks a number of browser settings in the process. I came to the website hoping to find that the installer had been hacked and was being fixed, but sadly I read that this install is known and intentional.
We will be withdrawing our recommendation of your software off of our company website. Also, we have donated financially to this project in the past, and will not be doing so again unless this practice is reversed.
Here’s hoping this was an oversight and is sorted out soon.
Sincerely,
The Team
Avinus Web Services
www.avinus.com
I must agree with the above discussion. Your products have provided outstanding service in the past, but the latest versions with bundled installer have created more problems than they are worth. I am uninstalling both PDF Creator and PDF Architect from all of our machines as soon as possible. The lack of options for selecting what parts of the bundle get installed is unforgivable. It has corrupted our Internet Explorer settings on a number of machines and added unwanted and unneeded toolbars and “helper” add-ons. We would have been willing to pay for PDFCreator if you had asked, but to force us into this position has lost you a customer and created GREAT amounts of anger and frustration. I am sorely disappointed in this lack of forethought. Please let me know if you ever fix this problem.
Have a nice day
Tyler
Chief Physicist
HCRO
P.S. Noooo. Regarding the Idewitt’s poorly reasoned and uninformed remarks above, some of us are neither inexperienced nor inept users of computers and software, nor do we all click through without reading, as he seems to do with his superficial reading skills. I did decline the license and it still installed unwanted PDF add-ons in internet explorer, created services on the machine, and lost me several days work.
Have a really nice day.
Tyler
Hi Tyler,
I am sorry, but I can’t agree with you there. For several versions, we have been working on making the offer screens as transparent as possible. There is a single screen asking whether to install the offer or not and you have to click on accept or decline to select one of them. We also have dropped offers from our partners that have a bad reputation. And it is always easily possible with a single click to not get the offers.
Regarding the add-ons you are mentioning in your afterpost: they come with PDF Architect. We are working on improving the setup to allow to deselect the integration during the setup. If you deselect PDF Architect during the setup, you will not get these.
kind regards,
Philip
Most of this thread transpired in summer 2012, with the last response above a month or two month before I’m posting.
Hi,
we do not spread malware in our setup. Also, I cannot imagine how a software offer should be able to screw up the display driver… Dou you know what your friend installed? And how was that related to the display driver?
kind regards,
Philip
Hello, I download the installer from this site and the malware span.do has been installer without of my permission. I dont acept and the installer dont show any message form this malware,
Wonderful program, very bad addon.. it took me about an hour and some reboots to remove Snap.do browser hijack/malware:
Best of luck everyone
Hi,
Robin,
I just want you to know what a problem these add-ons caused my mom. I recommended she install PDF Creator because she needed to create PDFs. The add-ons caused her problems all day. She could not get her work done. It took us a long time to get all the crap off her system.
If you want your developers to be associated with crap, you’ve done a good job. If you can’t develop open source software without bundling crapware, then please don’t do this kind of work. You just give open source and sourceforge a bad name.
Troy
Unfortunately Philip, from experience I can say it does spread malware. It is obvious from the number of comments and my own experience, that this is the case.
Jim
Why doesn’t the software use an “opt-in” for the additional software, rather than opt-out ?
The answer is that most of the people who make the malware install are oblivious about the install processes – just the sort of folks who are most abused by malware, generally, and most likely to be valuable to their authors.
Good software should protect against this – good installation design should also.
Use an opt-in method for additional offerings, in precisely that same language, so that the default action (ie, doing nothing more than clicking “next”) will install your software, alone.
I, too, have helped folks unwind the errant installs of PDFCreator’s malware.
All this leaves a large crowd of folks whose value for your trademark is impugned – a value which is inconsistent with the software value.
On the pdfforge.org website i see pdf creator is 100% clean No Adware, Spyware or virusses
However: During the installation of the latest version (v1.7.0) and also some previous versions I get a message:
C:\\Users\\testuser\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\is-CDI83.tmp\\OCSetupHlp.dll" belongs to adware or PUA 'OpenCandy' (of type Adware).
from my anti virus program (Sophos endpoint security and control (v10.0)...
Why do i get this message??!!
Please remove this unwanted piece of software from the installation!
Hi,
Sophos calls this PUA (Potentially Unwanted Application). Any kind of advertising is deemed potentially unwanted. So as long as we will be advertising anything, they will keep that report.
But it also says that it is not harmful. And you always have the choice to install the offer or not.
Potentially Unwanted Application? That’s cute. Literally nobody wants this extra crap.
@LinkDJ: You throw several things into one pot here… PDF Architect is a pdfforge product, just like PDFCreator. Even though most users come for PDFCreator, a lot of users like PDF Architect. It is a plain setup component, which you can control with /COMPONENTS= (as you do for language files, Images2PDF etc.)
The PUA flag is in regard to OpenCandy, our advertisement provider. This is flagged for the fact that it is advertising anything. We are trying to get them the best offers, upcoming now are some interesting offers from Microsoft, for example. They all need the explicit users consent to be installed, so there is nothing to deal with for your scenario.
the installer PUA - opencandy is buggy it prevents the pdfcreator for completing ie the pdfcreator would not be installed because of opencandy.dll i think you need to remove the opencandy.dll from the installer as it is preventing the main product from installing
I think the advertising software is more important to them than the “main product”.
PDF Creator is great software, but the bundled crapware is a pain in the ass for non-technical users.
It’s trivial for me to refuse the crapware and refuse to agree to the licenses for the crapware.
But it’s a whole other thing for non-technical Windows users who are used to just clicking “yes” to everything. They end up with crapware on their computers…that I end up having to clean out.
I work in a small non-profit organization that provides public computer access. We install PDF Creator on our public area machines and on staff machines. I’m able to keep the crapware off of the public access machines because the public user has no admin rights.
But, unfortunately staff do have admin rights on their local machines (I know not a smart idea) and so much as I’ve tried to educate them about bundled crapware, I still always find the stuff on their machines whenever they ask me to help them with something or to fix a problem.
I am a strong supporter of free and open source software and I consider what the PDF Forge team is doing to be unethical. I get proprietary software developers bundling crapware. I expect it from them. I don’t expect bundled crapware from a FOSS developer.
It’ is unethical and you know that it’s unethical. You are taking advantage of uneducated non-technical Windows users.
If you need to raise money then do it. I get that. Allow us to make micro payments on your website.
As soon as a reasonable FOSS alternative becomes available for folks stuck using this awful Windows operating system, I’m out of here.