Hrm. TX's post had me worried and the changelog had me even more worried. Why doesn't it say in the changelog that this can be turned off?

In any event, it was by no means obvious to anyone who didn't elect to download and run the beta despite expecting that it would annoy them into reverting to an older version, thereby losing all their incomplete downloads and stuff. I can only assume it would become obvious to someone that did run the beta despite having been given every reason to give it a miss -- nothing substantially new since 4.9.1 and one thing that sounded potentially unbelievably annoying to the point of being a show-stopper.

I think you should make this feature's off-turnability widely known as soon as possible. Your first inclination might be that people are "spreading fud" and their posts ought to be deleted, but odds are they simply assumed it couldn't be turned off any more than the "overwrite, yes or no" one can be, or any of the others that can pop up when you double click a search result. And their intention was probably not to actually drive anyone away from Limewire but to make the developers seriously rethink a feature they thought would be a massive pain rather than a benefit, or add the capability to turn it off, or something of the sort. Deleting their posts will more than likely fuel all kinds of rumours, fears, and paranoia -- precisely what you want to avoid. "I saw a post saying that future limewires will nag you to death until you switch to windows media player! And then it disappeared! They don't want the truth to be known!" It isn't hard to believe that at least some people will react in such a fashion, and when their posts are deleted in turn, the same rumors will spread via unmoderated backchannels. There are at least 2 unmoderated Usenet groups with a p2p focus, one of them fairly active, and there's email. Heck there's even Limewire itself. I could create a file in my shared folder and name it "avoid limewire 4.9.2 it will nag u if you download anything not riaa approved -- pass it on" if I wanted to (I don't).

The weapon against ignorance isn't silencing anyone -- it's posting the clarification/correction/whatever wherever any ignorant opinion or partial information that can result in a misleading conclusion appears. Which is what you did here, but you also made a threat that seems pointless. Either it's idle, or it's not; if it's idle it's pointless, and as pointed out above, if it's not it's a big mistake that will make the problem worse instead of solving it.

The best spot to put the information that this thing will allow people to turn it off is in the changelog itself, amending it. So far, I've seen a couple of posts complaining/worried/warning about this change and all mentioned the changelog; one even mentioned exactly how to navigate to it from the limewire home page. That is fairly responsible behavior by people who simply only got part of the truth, I suspect, and it means that an amendment to the changelog will be seen by many people who see the frightening posts you are so concerned about.

The other thing to do of course is to post followups reassuring people that they'll be able to turn this thing off anywhere someone has posted worried that they won't.