My Antivirus Blocks SparkChess – why?

SparkChess does not contain any form of malware, spyware, adware or anything harmful. It doesn’t interact with the system beyond loading & saving games and accessing the internet in multiplayer; the installer doesn’t do anything else besides copying files. Still, some overzealous antiviruses may very rarely flag SparkChess and move it to quarantine. (Sometimes, antiviruses manage to actually label themselves as viruses.)

SparkChess was briefly flagged by Norton Antivirus as ‘WS.Reputation1‘, which basically means a file not commonly downloaded (new release – duh!). We worked with Symantec and whitelisted it but the process has to be repeated for every release. You should keep your virus definitions up-to-date so you don’t get false-positives.

If you are unsure about SparkChess for Windows, you can use the free VirusTotal.com service to upload and scan the installer. They scan with 70 different antivirus and antimalware programs .

If Norton Antivirus quarantined your download, please follow these instructions to restore it.