What happened to the automatic actions in the Boot-time scan?

Since the release of avast v5.0, we have heard quite a few times the question “where do I set up the automatic actions for the boot-time scan”? As a matter of fact, we decided to remove this feature from avast 5 and this short post will try to explain why.
The reason why the boot-time scan (BTS) in v5 doesn’t support automatic actions is that the feature (at least for now) is very dangerous. In the past, we have seen a worrying number of users who accidentally deleted critical system files by means of the boot-time scanner set up to take automatic actions.
Let me explain this in a bit more detail. Avast has a number of measures designed to fight with false positive issues. False positives, no matter how hard the AV companies try, were always here, are here, and will be here. However, there are many ways to mitigate this issue.
One of the most powerful anti-FP measures is that whenever avast detects a virus, it also consults the whitelist of well-known good applications, and files digitally signed by trusted publishers (such as the binaries belonging to the operating system itself). And whenever it finds out that a detection was made on a whitelisted/trusted file, it basically assumes that it’s a false positive and doesn’t really report the file as infected (and, more importantly, doesn’t (continue reading...)