Yeah I'm Vidi. And yeah, I have a REAL big chip on my shoulder when it comes to this topic.

I ask you to consider that you had over a year and a half to come up with a suitable working alternative to WM and epic failed only to slap the player base in the face on patch day.

What you have documented here, is your ineffective war on the one source that has always worked for me.

Both Curse and WoWInterface have taken turns becoming completely inaccessible by any other means on Patch Days...but WM? One button and updated.

Now this one really has me curious. How will anything change with Minion ( I refuse to call it by that alphabet soup ridiculousness you people thought was a good idea for a name ) Won't thousands of people using Minion all trying to update their addons at the same time produce the exact same effect? Why yes it will won't it?

I think what bothers me the most is this is all about money and YOU just won't admit it. Throughout your quotes there and the threads they come from you paint this picture of yourself as a friend to the addon community, but the authors can't charge for their work, yet somehow you CAN charge for access to their work.

Like I said on WOW Insider, That's quite a scam you've got going there.

OH and btw you didn't ask my permission to post my quotes and my name from the other site. Doesn't that mean you broke some copyright of some sort? At least some rule of etiquette? No? Whats that you say? Once its on the internet its anybody's to grab? I quite agree.

My apologies, I'll remove those references immediately. I thought you might appreciate the courtesy. I was apparently mistaken.

Well I as well as others here have personally not been effected at all. If at all it's a good thing as both sites were accessible for me on patch day and the days afterwards.

Well the thing is Vidi is this was a last straw solution. They've been trying to work with Wowmatrix since October 2007. Wowmatrix have gotten past every protection both sites have put in place. So I ask you what would you do after a year of trying to work with a company that gets past *every* protection you have in place and that ignores any communication directed at them over a year ?

WM updates from Curse,WoWI and a few other sites. If say Curse and WoWIN go under where would WM download updates from ? This is assuming of course the addon authors dont upload their mods anywhere else if WM goes down.

Also for me. I'm in NZ. I'm already an entire Ocean away. Yet on patch day I was able to load up both sites within 30 seconds. I had absolutely no problems updating any of my addons. This is compared to the last major content patch when "this site is inacessible" errors were coming up all the time.

The excess traffic was from all the scrapping WM was doing. Arrowmaster from the wowace site was able to decompile the source code for the client from memory. It doesn't have a list download URLs. It has a list of addon pages the addons are updated at. It has to scrap that page to get the link for the download. This is what was causing the extra bandwidth.

1) Of course it's about the money. It's about stopping the drain of money paying for the extra bandwidth wowmatrix uses.

2) Painting herself as a friend ? Who Cairenn (sp?) ? She doesn't need to she's already done enough for the community as it is ! Not only running this site but administrating it. As well as organising Beta Keys and also attending Blizzcon and meeting the addon authors. She has no need to fakely paint herself as a friend to the addon community . She already is.

3) Addon updater program ≠ Addon. Nor are they authors. There fore not covering by the UI policy. Admins at Curse also asked Blizzard if they could do their Premium addon service. Blizzard gave the OK to it.

No scam just the truth. A truth I've come to form from reading posts about this going back to October 2007. Say have you read all the posts in this thread. Much of what you said has been refuted in it.

Here's some highlights :

http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...6&postcount=10

http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...4&postcount=77

http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...&postcount=448

http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...&postcount=416

Nope, not at all. I would assume that Minion will be either (a) accessing special low-bandwidth pages for it's updated/download info and links or (b) using an RSS-ish data feed for updated addons tied to your WoWInterface account. Even without an actual account, option B is quite viable by using unique identifiers in the client, or obtained by the client.

You see, the evil WoWMatrix utility is not a friendly piece of software. It transfers page after page of WoWInterface's website to gather information about what versions of addons are available and to download them, etc. This causes a large consumption of bandwith.

Imagine you have 25 addons installed, as an example. At the very least, WoWMatrix is pulling 25 full-content (text, images, stylesheets etc) from WoWInterface just to scrape the source to find out what the current version is, and obtain the download link. If each of these pages contain a mere 100kb (which is frankly quite low) of source and images, you're sucking down 2500kb of data from WoWInterface's servers just to 'check' on your addons. Multiply this by the thousands upon thousands who use WoWMatrix, and it adds up quite quickly.

On the other hand, suppose you have the same 25 addons and use some other utility (such as the upcoming Minion) which accesses a -single- 'light' page to obtain addon versions and download links, that could easily be squeezed into less than 5kb (with changelogs!). You'd be pulling a mere 125kb of data from their servers. This would be a huge change in consumption once you do the multiplication over the number of people who would be using it.

Now, I have no idea what Minion is planning on using to consider and display updates, but the potential savings for bandwidth is enormous.

There's no scam going on, not sure why your even bothering, your gonna believe what you want to believe no matter what anyone shows you.

Nice attitude by the way.

Actually you are at 5000kb (just under 5MB) as WoWMatrix downloads the page twice, once scraping for version number, once scraping for the link.

This is one of the things about the internet I cant stand. No way to truly express tone. For example, when I cap a single word it's not yelling its emphasis. ( sometimes its Sam Kinison style yelling for emphasis which I find HE-LAR-E-US ) I was simply being sarcastic to make a point. I'm sorry. I didn't actually expect you to remove anything.

That's wonderful that its accessible to you. But I think you have to understand something. I am not a unique and special snowflake. And because of that, out of 11.5 million players worldwide I seriously doubt I am the only one to experience the issues with WoWInterface that I've experienced.

On patch day and usually for several days after, WoWInterface become nearly inaccessible to me. Maybe the front page will load but each subsequent page I tried to load to reach the download link takes so long the page times out.

It was this issue that led me to WoWMatrix in the first place. And suddenly, one button and all my addons updated. No nore hours of trying to get this website to load its pages only to watch them time out again and again. No instead, I was up and running in a matter of minutes.

So on the day 3.1 hit, and I found that WoWMatrix was no longer working, I was distressed. But I wasn't angry until I found out why.

And now that I learn even more about how long you folks had to come up with a workable solution to the issue, I find what you did all the more appalling.

You see, you seem to think this is about WoWmatrix vS YOUR bandwidth. You didn't block WoWMatrix, you blocked it's users.

You blocked me.

And then, you talk about your WOWMatrix clone? And expect people to hail it as something wonderful. Well, some of us remember the bs you just pulled.

The week of 3.1 was hell. WoWInterface was completely inaccessible to me until Friday. Curse was laggy and timing out. and WoWUi...giggles...well we all know that site sucks so lets not go there.

And when I was finally able to get onto WoWInterface I read your little speech about how you "had" to do it because Curse was doing it. And the talk of Minion...

well, I just had a half hour long phone call which has totally thrown me off.

The point is your website has never worked that well for me. Curse has been no better. Patch days were days I spent updating addons and trying to get back into game. Sometimes successfully often times not. WoWMatrix solved all my issues. You, on the other hand, have not. In fact, by blocking WM, especially WHEN you blocked it, you returned me back to the hell of patch days.

That may mean nothing to you. Based on the threads you posted, it's obvious you consider yourself AT WAR with WM. And every war has its casualties. I was one of those casualties. And considering a player base of 11.5 million, I seriously doubt that I am special and unique enough to be the only one.

I think that you should consider that while you are heralding your new program, MMOUI Minion ( you totally need to change that name to just The Minion. ) You should consider the fact that doing what you did, when you did it, was not looked on as "good" from all sides of the player base and even though Minion may eventually be the solution to all our problems, you contributed to our problems as well. And you did it when you could have simply waited until a non patch day to do it afteryou released your alternative.

So for those wondering that is why I have an "attitude".

I haven't posted here for a couple weeks. but today i decided to check WM and see if my addons (that they host) are up to date. They all were...anyway, my point...

They added a new button to their "more info" box for unsupported addons, and I read the page.

Here's the link:
(because WowI filters this particular website, you'll need to type in the WM url, followed by the folder and page)

/faq/site-updates.html

Why is it that, after reading WM's version of what's going on, and the history behind it, that I am even more frustrated with Curse and WowI now? Did WM seriously come to you guys and REQUEST to help pay for your bandwidth, and even host addons on their site, to which you simply ignored, while at the same time having a usable feed for them and others like them to download addons and use your bandwidth? I tend to think they did...they haven't shown reason for me to distrust them (as curse and now WowI have).

All of you think-headed people who hate WM should read the page I linked above. WM is doing almost exactly what I had in mind for doing (with a few exceptions) which would have helped authors and end users considerably, but WoWi and curse were too stubborn and too profit minded to listen. And now they're forcing us, the endusers, to do the same web-hopping crap we had to contend with for years before WM came out.

See, you want the edge in this addon business, but you don't offer the user any good services to compete with WM, so like any child who can't have his toys, he cries and cries until mama takes the toys away from everyone. If you would have just done the right thing to begin with, instead of checking to see how many bills were in your wallet, none of this would be happening.

Read the info guys that's all I gotta say. It's right there. I expect that WM even has copies of the emails and letters (and posts) sent, to which WoWi ignored and Curse responded by trying to buy WM out.

Unblock WM and do what they asked you to do months ago! Don't let the users suffer for your insolence! Do the right thing! Unblock them and make a deal with them! Show Curse that you have a heart that isn't lined with dollar signs. If Curse doesn't follow suit then they will go down, while you and WM stand strong working together! Its the only right thing to do and you know it! Quit being a baby!

As stated numerous times throughout this thread and others that Admins of WowI were not happy with the situation but were forced to deal with it. The 2 major sites WM pulled from (curse and this one) were under stress for years as you are aware. Curse decided to block them and told the folks here they were doing it. They had 2 choices:

1) Not block it as well and be forced off-line there for taking one of the major sources WM pulled from anyway ( i STILL dont get why people dont realize this) therefore adding to the 'problem' WM users are now experiencing.

or

2) Block the application and be up and running for folks to get their mods that may only be hosted here. In the process still making WM users angry because they still cant get their mods from the site in this case because it was blocked.

Now you personally may be a rational human being and see a site down message and just shrug and move on till its up. Assuming this, unfortunately many MANY players are not and would continually spam the update all button in an attempt to try and 'sneak in' for an update for the brief moments the servers would be up.

Waiting until afterward would have made little to no difference on the user end of things. You still wouldnt be able to get your addons from here till the traffic died down. The only difference in the 2 cases is in Case 1 you could just spam the button till it eventually worked. Which could have taken several hours (optimistically) or several days on the rough side of the things.

And being that if the site is down authors cant push the updates as needed its even more imperative that action be taken or be forced offline. It happened last major patch due to the traffic WM imposed. This time around while the site was a little slow it was still accessible and thats a MAJOR improvement over last time. The difference? WM was unable to overload the servers.

Would WOWi liked to have had their updater up and running? As stated numerous times, Yes they would have liked that option. Being that this site takes much more work to maintain (author tools and site improvements etc.) compared to WM and Shirik (the programmer behind minion) is doing this between a rather hefty real life schedule it just wasnt possible at the time.

These facts have been laid out many times before. Of course Wm refutes this and claims it was a malicious attack and a money grab (not exact words but thats the tone). You can do one of 2 things. Either accept this is the case or believe WM.

Personally I've dealt with the MMOUI staff for years on various sites. They have been here for the community for a very long time. they have the track record to prove it. WM is a relative newcomer in this 'game' and they came out of the gate showing they only cared about the ad money they made off the application. Only recently did they start to change their tune and appear to come across as fully community minded. Call me bizarre but i have a tendency to believe the people who have the track record to back up their claims. I honestly cant recall in the history of working with Cairenn, Dolby and others on the various sites they have been apart of anything of this nature.

I believe that deserves some serious consideration as to their motives and plans.

You know what's really really REALLY funny? It's all this "i'm right, you're wrong, and I ain't standing down for nothing" mentality. WoWI and Curse could CARE LESS about the user community OR the authors! I mean add it up guys, especially you authors! 1 - you get NO MONEY for your addons. 2 - WoWI and Curse BOTH make a HUGE profit for YOUR addons. 3 - End Users have to contend with jumping between 2 or 3 websites to find addons and to make sure they're up to date.

Now this is NOT complicated. WowI and Curse are NOT your friends! They are the ones scamming everyone. They talk about bandwidth and author's rights, but that is NOT what they look at on their daily stats sheets. They look at how many clicks people make and how many pennies are rolling in. The only thing on their minds is...bottom line! They're a business, just like any other, only in THIS case the suppliers don't make a PENNY for the goods they produce! ALL the profits go to the department stores!

Think about that. How would you like to offer goods and services to customers using a 2nd party goods and services retailer and get NO profit from what you offer? Why are you sticking up for these people? They're freaking Farengi from Star Trek! They got big ears, they're short, and all they care about is profits.

Look at the world of Open Source. A website like, I don't know sourceforge.net, they operate similarly as curse and wowi. Why has there not been wars over their open source marketing? Because they don't get all anal about bandwidth. They are smart. They know how to make a profit, they know how to keep the open source writers happy, AND they know how to make users like me happy. Websites like sourceforge.net have been around for YEARS! I have a website that costs me about 15 a month to operate. I get UNLIMITED bandwidth and UNLIMITED storage space! It is NOT about bandwidth folks, it's about greed. Pure and simple. If I can get UNLIMITED bandwidth for 15 dollars a month, so can wowi and curse. And I am quite certain they make a LOT more than 15 dollars a month!

Most of us "think headed" (think headed? really?) have read their so-called faq, and were smart enough, or thiink-headed enough to recognize it for what it is, a page full of bold-faced lies designed (successfully, apparently) to lead people like you to post posts like yours. Give up the fight, man... WowI is not going to change their minds. Curse is not going to change its mind. The war is over. And flights of angels sing wowmatrix to its lofty rest.

Ad money? AD MONEY???? Are you that completely DULL? Let me see, let me get my tape measure...

WowI's website has 2 ads, NOT wow-related at all (an allied moving company ad and some other social website). The ads are nearly 7" long each and nearly 2" wide each. Now let me check WM's application....they have 4 links at the top of their application. they are ALL WOW related with the exception of a software link for cleaning a system registry. All for links, when measured, are not as long as 1 of the banner ads on this site. AD MONEY?? As if WowI and Curse aren't collecting from ad money.

I was in sales for most of my early adult life. Do you honestly think stores like Best Buy (I worked there) or what was Circuit City really care about the customers?? Do you really think that? I was one of the few salesmen who DID care, and in both cases I had to quit because I was less concerned about bottom line and more concerned about customers. Do you think Curse or WowI are any different? Frankly, i don't know that WM is any different...but at least they have a rocking good application and at least they were willing to work with WowI and Curse - to which they were either ignored or threatened. Now that arrogance that WowI and Curse had is being sucked away from them...their true colors are being revealed, and I along with a lot of others don't like what we see.

How do you know their lies??? How do you know? Because you approach them with your...yes thick headed presupposition. WowI is my friend, as is Curse, WM is from hell, thus anything they say is a lie. Right?

I was at least open enough to hear WowI's side of things (not curse's never liked em). But now i don't trust them at all. They lost me as a customer, and they lost a lot of friends who used them and now abandoned them too. Do you think that we're the only ones? WowI won't last much longer if it continues as it is now. Nor will Curse. If lack of business doesn't cause that, Blizzard WILL. Part of my plan for the new site/service I am going to offer IS NOW putting curse and wowI out of business...they've ripped off enough people.

SHOOt I need to stop posting here, because every time I do they're making money off of me!

REMOVE MY ACCOUNT FROM THIS SITE! YOU ARE NOT GETTING PAID FOR ME TO RANT ANYMORE!

As requested, I have removed your account.

You mean the same one your presenting now?

So your saying WM makes no money off this? If so why does the application have an advertisement in it? Doesnt matter how small or tucked in the corner it is. It STILL makes them money. On top of that until recently they also had 0 costs to cover by comparison? Or does the sudden hosting of opensource license addons absolve them of these things?

So your saying the authors are completely blinded to how this works? that you are the beacon of light in all of this removing the veil of secrecy from the shady underworld that is site hosting? You should give the authors more credit than that. Don't you think that if they felt like they were being used to make a buck for someone else they would have moved on by now? Obviously there is mor to this than you care to either admit or realize. It just comes across as trying to encite people for your own purposes.


Sourceforge.net is run by SourceForge.INC a publicly traded business. It is run nothing like how this site is run. From their about link on the site:

Nothing like this site at all in terms of how costs are covered. They get them from alternate revenue streams for other owned and operated businesses.

WOWi also pays for storage and data transfer. Its not 'just a website' and thre are more costs involved then your either aware of or are willing to admit to. Have your site go though 1.2-1.8 TB per hour and see how long your unlimited bandwidth lasts.

The assumptions that are sometimes thrown into a conversation really are amusing. Not sure that I could say anything more in a civil tone, so I will .

Buh Byeeeee. Good luck on your crusade.

Random side note. This thread has passed the screen shots of your UI thread by a decent margin. Hot issue indeed.

/hijack terminated

We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting and raving.

How many times must you thick headed people be told? Size doesn't matter. It's what you do with it that counts.


/end sarcasm