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Frequently‐asked questions
In short: No, but follow your best judgement when installing unfamiliar programs.
A: Aerochat is a free-and-open-source program that has no money at all going into its development. One of the limitations here is that we cannot digitally sign our program, because digital signatures cost hundreds of dollars per year to maintain. Many antiviruses are a lot more skeptical about the behaviour of programs lacking digital signatures because they are easier to produce and so the lowest-hanging fruit of malware will also be unsigned.
As for past examples of antivirus detections we've tripped, we got the "Dropper" detection from a whopping 7 out of the 72 (SEVENTY-TWO) engines that VirusTotal provides ON OUR SETUP WIZARD. In fact, if you scanned the installed files, they wouldn't be detected at all. "Dropper" just means a program that "drops" (or puts) files onto your disk. We also know these as setup wizards or self-extracting installers. This is a completely harmless detection that might as well say "potentially-unwanted program".
The source code of Aerochat is public and free for all to scrutinise. Sensitive information, such as your Discord token, is stored in a secure manner on your system and only shared with Discord API requests which require it. Although Aerochat makes some requests to other web resources, i.e. GitHub User Content for checking for updates and retrieving the news, we do not share any of your Discord account information with these foreign servers. (Feel free to analyse network traffic of Aerochat in Wireshark or Fiddler too)
However, we still suggest that you follow your best judgement. If you do not trust a program, then you should not use it.
In short: Windows 7+ only.
A: Aerochat only supports 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and later releases of Windows. You may able to get it working on macOS or Linux with Wine, but you're on your own there.
In short: No.
A: macOS and Linux ports have been considered, but due to our software stack (Windows Presentation Foundation) not supporting either, will not be done at this time.
A mobile version of Aerochat for Android and/or iOS would practically require a complete rewrite and redesign as mobile user interfaces use fundamentally different design traits from traditional desktop applications, such as the one we're imitating, Windows Live Messenger. Therefore, a mobile port is not considered.
A: Yes!
Microsoft themselves care a lot about backwards compatibility—Windows is famous for it—and even the original Windows Live Messenger client has no troubles running on the latest versions of Windows. Aerochat is completely written from the ground up and tested exclusively on modern versions of Windows, so it would be pretty strange if it somehow didn't support Windows 10 or 11.
In short: Install the update linked below.
A: This is a flaw with the .NET 8 runtime environment. The .NET runtime crashes before anyone gets a chance to show a message box, so it's a silent crash. However, the .NET runtime is nice enough to log an error, which you can see in Event Viewer.
The specific error you are probably getting is:
Message: Failed to load the dll from [C:\Program Files\dotnet\fxr\8.0.15\hostfxr.dll], HRESULT: 0x80070057
The library hostfxr.dll was found, but loading it from C:\Program Files\dotnet\fxr\8.0.15\hostfxr.dll failed
- Installing .NET prerequisites might help resolve this problem.
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=798306
In order to work around this issue, install the KB2533623 or KB3063858 updates for Windows 7. Microsoft took down the downloads for the original KB2533623 update, but it can still be found on the Internet Archive. KB3063858 is a security update for the operating system which contains KB2533623, and can be downloaded from Microsoft's website.
A: We do not have a particular schedule or priority order for the implementation of most features. Features are added by contributors in their free time when they want to work on them. If you want to add a feature yourself, feel free to clone the source code and play around with it.
A: Scenes and ads are traditionally submitted by users on our Discord server during voting periods between Aerochat releases. Contributors are informally allowed to add a couple scenes or ads with their pull requests, but it needs to be reasonable.
A: This is a somewhat benign affliction. Just reset your password and be more careful with how you use Aerochat. Aerochat is a custom client which is imperfect about abiding certain Discord restrictions (i.e. character length or rate limits), and can sometimes trip an automated spam check. Discord will usually associate this with a hijacked account.