WoWInterface and Curse working together to help protect authors and other site-users
 

Recently WoWInterface and Curse got together to come up with a solution for an ongoing problem. The problem in question is WowMatrix. The reasons they are a problem are many:

• WowMatrix violates author copyright and intellectual property rights:
  • They redistribute addons without authors' permissions;
  • When they first started they would scrape the legimate sites for addons then upload them to their own site in addition to deep-linking from the sites;
  • They edited authors' files to remove donation requests and links to their home sites, etc.; and
  • They have failed on many occasions to honour authors' requests to remove addons from their application;
• In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of date. This leads to authors having users complain about bugs, bugs that were fixed days or weeks ago in versions that are available on the legitimate sites, causing problems for both the authors and for the end-users;
• Until the community raised a hue and cry, Wowmatrix didn't even supply the authors' names as to who wrote the addon, let alone provide a link to where the addon was legitimately hosted;
• WowMatrix leeches from the legitimate hosting sites without permission, let alone compensation. Originally, they scraped our sites so they could upload addons to their own site without permission, in addition to deep-linking from our sites. They have finally stopped hosting the addons on their own site, but they still deep-link from our sites, using our resources to run their program. WowInterface and Curse use a lot of bandwidth every month which costs a lot of money. The way we pay our bills is through site ads, which are directly dependent on users viewing them, and premium memberships. WowMatrix bypasses our download pages, and, as a result, people are not viewing the ads. Of course, this means the ads aren't generating any revenue to pay for the bandwidth. At the rate they were going, if they were allowed to continue using our resources without any compensation, they were going to drive us right out of business. Not only are they stealing our bandwidth and preventing us from being able to recoup that loss, they also have their own ads all over their site and application. They are directly profiting from the stolen bandwidth; and
• Due to the massive resource drains they put on our sites, we have all experienced heightened loads and weaker performance, especially on patch days. During those days they download so much from our sites that sometimes we have a hard time keeping up to the demands; thus causing legitimate users to experience problems accessing our sites. That's just flat out unacceptable.

For months now, both sites and multiple authors have been trying to come up with solutions to the problems caused by WowMatrix. However, WowMatrix just keeps ignoring authors' requests to remove their addons from their application, working around the protections we have put in place, and proving repeatedly that they have no intention of ever becoming responsible, legitimate members of the community. Instead, they choose to continue to leech off the community. Well we, WoWInterface and Curse, have gotten together and between us we believe we may have found a solution to prevent them from pulling authors' addons from our sites to redistribute without permission and stealing our bandwidth any longer. Unfortunately we cannot release details on the solution, so as to keep it viable.

"Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah, get to the important question: What does this mean for me, your sites' user?" For the majority of users it should be completely transparent, you should not notice any difference whatsoever, other than improved site responsiveness during patch days. We hope that we will be able to revert the changes made to our sites eventually, if Wowmatrix ever stops violating authors' copyright and ceases stealing our bandwidth and other resources.

If you were previously using WowMatrix to keep your addons updated, please use our official updaters (WoWInterface, Curse). You may also mark addons as favorites on both WoWInterface and Curse in order to be alerted when they are updated.


Cairenn
Administrator, WoWInterface

Kaelten
Administrator, Curse & WowAce

[Note] If you are having any problems with being able to access files now, please post in this thread with details as to what OS you are running, what browser you are using, etc.

*applaud*

Let's hope that the measures in place, will bring some sense into these people and they will finally decide to claim a legitimate position in the community, so that such extreme actions are never again required.

Awesome, been hoping for something like this to happen for a long time.

For the sake of both sites and the authors, I'm genuinely glad to hear a solution has been found.

yay :banana:

I raise you a banana!
:banana::banana:

Glad to hear this news, wowmatrix could have easily killed both these sites on patch day.
Just wish you could share a little more details about what you did to shut em down.

I think after a while these details might be shared. But this is me trying to be Miss Cleo right now. We can only share these details once it's determined safe to do so.

In before you evil sobs broke poor matrix.


/congratulate
Awesome news!:cool:

Interesting timing, especially considering WoWInterface doesn't really have a competitive Updater.

If you would like to pay me for this product, then by all means I will work harder. Until such time that I'm paid for it, though, I have other priorities, such as getting an internship and maintaining my grades in grad school.

I find it very interesting to see how quickly the world owes people something that is created for free.

I for one I'm glad, i just hope that it will permanently cripple, and hopefully stop wowmatrix from its leeching.


Also TY Shirik for pointing me to the right thread. :):o:D

This couldn't be better news. Ive had a rough day but this made it all better. Great job guys! Hopefully this will keep them at bay for a long time. Thank you for your hard work! :banana:

Look a little closer at the timing tomorrow afternoon ^^

I for one am disappointed in this whole thing. One pathetic troll on the o.forums? Seriously people, stop agreeing with Cair/Kael. Things better get more interesting tomorrow when the clueless users go on their update binge.

Tekkub ....

I don't even know what your emoticons mean anymore...

Hehehe, that's me poking you, silly. ;)

Looks like you're trying to stab his eye out with a stick... :rolleyes:

<pours shot of Charbay Blood Orange Vodka>

<toasts> Bravo!

As a longtime wowmatrix user and advocate, I must say this really upsets me. I would happily have used either of the official site clients, if they weren't both complete **** compared to wowmatrix. It is (was?) simple, fast, intuitive and came with a minimal amount of advertisements. It was everything I wanted in an addon updater. I hope that now maybe you'll rework your clients in an attempt to make them more user friendly. If you'd done that in the first place, this problem likely would have never developed at all.

I don't think anyone here will argue that WM is (was?) not a well designed little program. The mistakes they made were in how they went about getting the content their program delivered.

They got the delivery method down solid, but ****ed up on the content source.
WoWI/Curse have the content, but haven't yet nailed the "better" delivery method.

It's kinda hard to fault the sites for not providing an update service when that wasn't their design intention in the first place. Hell, you could say all of this stemmed from ace, which got the delivery down great (maybe because it was a developer community in the first place) but failed on the bandwidth issue (and, well, WM follow in those footsteps). WoWI and Curse want to get the updater AND the bandwidth issues right, which is why it's taking time.

/congratulate

About time too.

To the WM user:

I really can't believe you are trying to defend WM (I am not going to bother with the name). You are setting yourself up for a good old fashioned flaming. I have used both WoWInterface Updater and the Curse Client (I was a tester for CC). I personally have never had issues with the recent versions of the Curse Client. Its an excellent updater. WIU is OK, it never had any adverts and it did what was advertised on the tin. Sure, it had its issues, but I found the WIU to be easy to use. Same thing with CC (especially Kaelten's overhaul of CC). Both the official updaters are fast, both don't have adverts (currently), CC is user friendly (WoWIU has some current minor issues but is usable). Neither official updater leeches bandwidth from other sites.

Besides its not difficult to manually update your AddOns. No one needs to update ALL of their AddOns everyday. By using WM your are basically giving "The Finger" to Curse, WoWInterface, WoWUI.Incgamers plus every Author who upload their mods to those sites. In my opinion you (and WM) do not display any shred of respect for any AddOn's authors nor the site they choose to upload to.

As a clueless person who was not aware of the issues caused by WM, and thus used it regularly, how do I go about fixing this? I downloaded the WoWIUI but it looks to be a lot of work to get it set up (having to track down the UID for everything). Is there anything I could do to make this easier? Especially since it seems to id all the sub-components of the various mods (i.e. the dozen or so folders for x-perl) as seperate mods.

And is the WoWIUI page accurate that it is actually an EoL product? Would I be better off getting the curse client? All I know is that I have already informed my family to remove WM from all our systems, now that I know the truth.

What I did when I was using WIU (I currently do all my updating manually) was to make use of the Favorite feature that WoWI has. Simple tag the mods you use as a Favorite (its just a quick click of a button). WIU will then retrieve your Favorites list making it real easy to keep tabs on the mods you use. Even though I manually update, I still find the Favorites feature on this site to be quite handy to keep track of the mods I use.

Most people just want WAU again. The growing amount of addons people run make manual updating a very time consuming process. WoW Matrix became popular (by word of mouth) because it was the most simple and effective updater after WAU was shut down. Especially when compared to the initial version of the Curse updater. The situation wouldn't have occurred if a user demand for it didn't exists.

Now the Curse updater is much better (3.0), the site has a huge following since the early days of WoW. Instead of being able to pull users away with a superior product and a pretty solid history in the community. They have to work on something that Wow Matrix will be able to bypass eventually.

If there is a relationship between WoWI and Curse, why two updaters?

I completely understand why people in charge of UI sites dislike WM. But I do think attacking this one product instead of the problem is much like the RIAA shutting down Napster.

There will be other update clients, some already allow users to define download sources.

In a word, yes. It's a much more mature project.

If you need to use WoWI for those few addons from authors who would rather not post to Curse you could setup WoWI's updater for just those. Although there aren't very many exclusive addons, so you could manually update them as well.

With WM being recommended by even the most casual of WoW players, sites, and podcast. I expect your situation will be very common tomorrow.

Pretty much, this. The issue of WoWMatrix has been thoroughly discussed (to death) in the past. It really all comes down to the fact that WAU set a very dangerous precedent by providing fast, easy and in the vast majority of cases needless updates. People got used to it, forsake the websites, they became demanding and condescending when devs accidentally (or even intentionally) broke something (remember it was alpha quality addons) and all in all, as a wise man once said, "it's just an old usecase that people refuse to give up." WoWI and Curse are just doing what they should have done from the beginning and while it may be "evil" to do so, on a patch day, it was no real secret that this coming for a long time now. Can't really understand why some people act so surprised.

People act surprised because, unless you're one of the people who bother with the forums here, you'd never know what's going on or why. There's no link I can find on the WOW Interface site explaining the issues people have with WowMatrix. There's nothing there if you're a normal user of the site.

WowMatrix will easily work around this, I'm sure - A change of a useragent string, throttling update polling, something like that, and we'll be back at square one, with users who just want to update their addons caught in the lurch, between the horrible interfaces of these sites or their clients, and the desire of these sites to cut off WowMatrix.

Of course, WowMatrix and it's ilk wouldn't be necessary at all if addon authors actually wrote addons that worked properly, instead of slinging blobs of broken code around.

-edit- One more thing. You must be truly proud of yourselves to go out of your way to inconvenience people on patch day. It's an interesting logic, there. I understand the part about wanting to reduce server load, and I'm sure there's an unspoken desire to push people to the site for all the various reasons you want hits. But at the same time, you offer a public service - It's interesting to me that you'd be so quick to inconvenience users of this service to spite WowMatrix authors.

This will just drive me to mirror addons on my guild's site, avoiding both the grief of trying to get everyone updated addons and having to deal with Curse or WoWInterface. Instead of being able to play tomorrow, I'll have to herd cats all day. I'm not alone in this regard - Surely, I'll be violating somebody's copyright by doing this, but I'm not about to wrestle with it.

I see some nice DMCA requests in the mailbox of your guild portals admin.

Let me guess, but the change to affect WM will also affect other free updaters like WUU, right?

Guild portals. Funny stuff.

File attachments in a phpBB restricted access subforum I setup for the sole purpose of this. I may even just pull addons to the server in a standard HTTP auth protected directory.

It's either this, or send each of a hundred guildmates here searching for updates to, say, FuBar. Have you tried searching for just the base FuBar addon here lately?

Modules that haven't been updated since 2006 show up in the default search.

Wow, just wow. I think this is one of the worst cases of user entitlement I've seen in a long time.

When did I suggest the world owes me something (I didn't even use an updater when I played WoW)? I'm just interested why WoWI would push ahead with this, when currently from what I've heard they're not in the best position to fully capitalise from it. I presume it was to avoid the incoming storm?

But anyway I'll get back to the heralding of the death of WoWMatrix. :)

Need moar QQ threads.

Here's the thing. These websites, curse and WoWInterface, are pretty close to openly hostile when you're looking for something. Search for an addon, and it'll gleefully let you download an obsolete addon. It'll happily let you grab addons that haven't worked in 3 years. It will, without hesitation, mix addons that do and do not work. A casual user won't know that while the website DOES have timestamps for updates, and DOES have an outdated category, it does not filter these out by default.

Very few addons, to my knowledge, refuse the right to redistribute the work the authors presumably want as many people as possible to use. It's a handful of individuals that get uppity about redistribution for whatever reason. I don't understand it, but it's left to us to work around.

It's amazing to me that through all this (I've been lurking in the threads on occasion), the authors of the addons that are up in arms about WowMatrix only have their interests in mind. They don't care about the end users of their 'products'. They just want to restrict where people download their addons from. Entirely their right, as misguided as such a desire is, but as a user (either directly, or peripherally through a guildmate's use of that addon improving their performance), it's something I'm left to try to work around.

I can either send each person using any given addon to WOWInterface, search, hope it turns up a useful result, download, get whatever the latest published version is, hope it works, hope they know how to manually install addons, hope it's backwards compatible with existing saved variables... Or I can do the legwork once, point people to a known working copy, and be done with it.

-edit- *snerk* Speaking of... 4 addons out of 22 updated in the last 3 months? The second one I look at is 'beta quality' with 5 comments, two of which are unresponded to errors. The very thing I dread when helping guildmates get addons installed regardless of the source.

Guess you haven't been to the UI and macros forum recently :p

As for Rendus, it is well within the rights of both WoWI and Curse to protect their investment, moreso since they provide the source of the files. WM is just a smart distribution mechanism (and you can debate that it isn't by mentioning technicalities such as "hotlinking" etc for 100 more pages, for 100 years, it won't alter the outcome), that offers nothing to those that are providing the source, which is ultimately addon authors. You see the real difference is, for sites such as WoWI and Curse protecting and supporting the providers of the source (aka authors) > user convenience (despite the fact that they also gain from it but why wouldn't they, at least they provide a valid service) and quite frankly this is an important reason on why many of us, continue to post our work here.

Ok to all you people *****ing about your preccious WM getting broken on patch day.
I have used WM for quite some time (in ignorance of the harm it causes WoWI and Curse) after reading the (legitimate imo) concerns towards the way WM pulls addons and even alters them I swapped my updaters to Curse client and WoWiUD, within 10mins every addon I use (around 100+) were covered and updated with minimal effort on my part.
There really is no issue here except the one of your own damn laziness to switch to an UD client that is friendly to these sites which provide you with much more than the raw addons.
In the time it has taken most of you to post here whining about your preciuos WM you could have DL'd and installed CC and WoWiUD and saved yourself the inevitable flaming you will surely recieve.

Version image
 

As I can see the new version image breaks other addon updaters (which uses html parse like Waddu) too. Is there any xml interface to get addon informations (update time, version, description, author infos) without getting the full info page?

And therein lies the problem. The authors of addons feel that the ability of the user to actually find and use their addon should be inhibited for whatever reason - I'm not sure if it's vanity, if it's some misplaced desire to control every aspect of their project, if it's just open hostility toward the people they wrote the addon for.

I have never, and will never, argue that WowMatrix's method was the correct one - I'm, believe it or not, on the side of the site maintainers in that regard, as the owner of a moderately popular site of some variety myself. Hotlinking denies them the ad revenue they'd receive from visits.

My point is solely this: I cannot understand why the addon authors, who have no stake in WoWInterface or Curse, are so vehemently against alternate means of getting their addons. This change did, as far as I can tell, break other addon updaters that did not have the issues people speak of with WowMatrix such as editing of addons and unauthorized rehosting (which is it - Do you want them to host the addons themselves, or not? You get arguments from both sides of that fence). There's likely no technical solution that would single out WowMatrix that wouldn't make it trivial to work around, but baby with the bathwater and all that.

The 'I'm going to rehost for my guild' comment was as much truth as bait of sorts to draw out the very sort of comment it did - DMCA takedowns for redistributing an unmodified copy of a work that is freely available, and almost certainly doesn't have licensing information made available on a page I can access without actually downloading the addon. This rehosting provides no further burden to WOWI/Curse, provides fantastic convenience to the users of these addons in that they will have a one-stop shop for addon updates that have been verified to work by their guildmaster and without having to deal with the oddities of the 3.1 Survival Guides and such that will crop up all over the place, with many of them being of dubious accuracy.

But, authors > users.

Myself, I have my addons updated. It's the other hundred or so people that'll be looking to me for help that I'm not looking forward to, and no amount of sloth on my part is responsible for it.

Want to walk your average WOW users through this? At a casual glance, I can't even find the WoWInterface installer. Find? Nothing. Community? This. Addons? Well, those are addons. Projects? Nope, a SVN repository of addons in various questionable stages of quality. Forums? This heap again.

I google for "wowinterface addon updater", and first hit has this gem:

Please Note: This updater is being discontinued. We're allowing you to continue downloading this current version until the new one is ready, but please be aware that it may not work as well as could be hoped for.

Well... That's... Good. So do I download that or not?

I know I wouldn't. And given the Downloads: 74,943 figure, I suspect many others aren't convinced either.

You don't get the point.
Curse and WoWI use tons of bandwith to provide addon updates to their users. They need to pay for that bandwith somehow, and they do so by displaying ads on the download pages of addons. What Wowmatrix does is circumvent these download pages by "hotlinking", e.g. linking directly to the files inside the curse/wowi servers. Now, you might ask, why are the sites' own updaters, most notably the curse client, different? Because the sites can put ads in there, too, thus can use that income to pay for the bandwith they use. If you support WoWmatrix, you support making Curse/WoWI bankrupt, and that would also mean no more addons quickly available to you.

regards,
stolenlegacy, addon author.

It has been stated multiple times in this thread, download the curse client until the new WoWI updater is ready, most addons avialable here are also avialable for download at curse, thus being updatable via the curse client.

I believe I get the point quite clearly, as demonstrated in the very block of text you quoted. For your convenience:

If the only argument addon authors made was the concern about WoWI/Curse, sure, I'd be onboard. The argument brought up more often than not from what I've seen, though, is the mod author's rights.

I think some of this is anger/fallout about the changes to the Blizzard UI policy regarding donations (another common complaint - They can't see my donation buttons!), directed at a target they can actually do something to.

The other hundred are to lazy to search for updates for their addons, they will be to lazy to search for the right place to get support or to submit a bug report.
Why should authors have a look on several alternate download pages for support questions, bug reports, and so on?

If you created something, only to discover it being distributed (directly or indirectly) by someone that wasn't even gracious enough to ask if its ok, then perhaps it did not upset you. Do not presume however that this logic applies to everyone. WM is just taking advantage of a technicality to avoid copyright infringement, by masking distribution as "linking". It is not legally wrong, but it is morally. Surprisingly enough, some do care.

As for who makes money out of it, it's not my primary concern either, however I can see how it can be a concern and given the option, I'd much rather have the people who are gracious enough to host the addons, benefit from it financially than anyone else. Why ? Because they make authors lives easier, they provide tools, repository system, packagers, the works. I hope that it is now crystal clear on why some of us have this "misplaced desire to control every aspect of our project". Misplaced desire, rofl. Really, now.


Here, you are just rambling. There are no "questionable stages of quality" in the repository. The vast majority of authors using it, are actively doing so. Most of the addons are very much usable and search can perform miracles, if you are patient and know what you are looking for. Hint : 'Favorites' are your friend.

All in all, if you are unfamiliar with the site, you can just as well seek help in a reasonable and polite manner. If you are here to stir trouble or vent your frustration due to your precious updater being broken on a patch day, then, as the moderators will probably confirm, you picked the wrong site.

The hundred (well, millions, when you look at the playerbase as a whole) that are incapable of updating their addons, be it from sloth, ineptitude, a lack of understanding, or whatever other reason, wouldn't be able to provide meaningful feedback in the first place, and likely would complain in guildchat about it, delete the addon, and find a replacement.

The few error reports that would be provided by these users would be copy and pastes of error text that the author should already be aware of if he's eating his own dogfood.

Because we DO have a stake in WoWInterface and Curse. Not financial, of course, but in support and hosting. Curse and WoWI have fully supported the addon community, with hosting, tools, forums, advice, and even in getting the mod authors into beta to make sure the addons are working come release time. It is in OUR BEST INTEREST to keep WoWinterface and Curse up and running. Heck, it is in the END USER'S best interest to keep them up as well, because without them, there's no distribution site.

Why did they pick today? It's obvious, they wanted to unveil this defense on the day they needed it the most. If WoWMatrix were working, this site would probably be crushed under the weight of hundreds of thousands of people spamming the update button, and their bandwidth usage would be astronomical. If they had released this last week, it would have given WM time to get around it.

When someone is stealing from your house, you add new locks.

I agree with the blocks, however I'm disappointed that I'll most likely be forced to use the Curse updater due to the basically nonexistent WOWI updater :(

Then let them find replacements. This is not a popularity contest and the Earth will keep spinning if users in that category don't use our addons. I will even go on a limb and state that said users do not deserve any kind of support in my eyes. I would suspect that others may feel the same way.

I'm not certain it is morally wrong. The people who feel they have been wronged surely do. I've created many things in the past that have been included in outright commercial products (Doom and Quake map pack disks in particular). I was, personally, honored to have been noticed and distributed. Perhaps mildly annoyed that I wasn't getting a cut, but a thousand wad authors makes for very shallow dividends.

The practice was commonplace. People'd FTP to cdrom.com/pub/doom/wads, pick stuff at random and stuff it on a disk. Most people included license text plainly visible as a separate .txt/file_id.diz file that explained redistribution rights - I waived mine. I still can't tell what most addons here say on the matter without downloading them. You get into weird territory with copyright in that area.

Indeed, I understand completely the desire of WOWI/Curse to control access to their site, and to direct downloads of files from their servers. I've made that as clear as possible.

You've partially answered the question regarding why people want their addons to only be distributed through these sites, but I still fail to understand why they're willing to go to such great lengths as to spawn arguments wherever they roam regarding it. It's WOWI/Curse's burden, not the interface author's, and again, I can't understand why interface authors feel that further distribution of the product they release free of charge to anyone who cares to click on a download link is upset by further distribution.

The argument continually switches between finances, author's rights, morality, but they never meet up in one cohesive, convincing argument.


Favorites are your friend until such a time as that favorite is no longer associated with the project. I see on the FuBar page, at some point, the author opted to no longer maintain FuBar on WOWI. Not sure why, but if I were using favorites, I'd likely see a lack of updates and move on. Then, it breaks. I check WOWI for updates for it. Still no update. I uninstall it and install TitanPanel instead because the author wanted to keep a tight handle on distribution of his addon for whatever reason.

You might notice I've been a registered user for quite some time, but with no posts to my name. This was back when WOWI required you to be a registered user to search (or perhaps download, I forget). I'm being boisterous and aggressive, but in no way am I stirring trouble or venting fustration. I'm providing a counter-point to the backpatting taking place here, from the perspective of an enduser inconvenienced for the luxury of the addon authors and WOWI.

There's another post after I started writing this reply, which I'll reply to here.

I didn't ask why they chose today. I actually explained why they chose today.

The argument of 'bandwith usage' is moot, though, after just a moment's thought. More bandwidth will be used by forcing the UI elements of every page to load, the PHP of every search to execute, the text of every futile search for each individual addon for each individual user than will be used by people clicking an update button. The average addon is relatively small - The largest addon I have installed is QuestHelper at 22MB.

Server load, moreso than bandwidth concerns, come into play during patch day due to searching, PHP code rendering (I'm pretty sure there's no backend caching taking place, but I haven't looked that closely), and user activity.

Out of curiosity, how many addon authors that state ad revenue for WOWI/Curse as their cause for concern visit these sites with AdBlockPlus or the like?

Edit for a gem:

It's this hostility toward users that utterly baffles me. If you want a working addon, and a convenient way of acquiring said addon, you deserve no support?

i dont trust other addon sites other than wowinterface and curse!!
if wowmatrix leeching these legit sites!! is it not possible to implement a situation where you have to be login as members before you can download? and put alot more security features like confirmation code that changes everytime you download the same files so that they cannot deep-link files in wowinterface and curse to wowmatrix?

It is technically possible for them to do this, and in the past WOWI used to require logins to either search for or download addons. They need to refrain from making the site more difficult to use, though, really.

Well you can play the game without addons. Sloth and ineptitude should be criminal offences, no wait would bring me to prison as well, but at least they do not work in this argument. If you do not like the standard interface, do your homework and read. Lack of understanding? What is so difficult in using favorites on this page? Even if the updater is discontinued it works fine (and as you have stated before, the people do not read, they would not even see that it is outdated).
If they could not update their addons due to a lack of understanding, how did they install WoW?

Maybe some of the authors wrote the addons for themself and not for other endusers. Thought about that?

11 million people are currently playing this game. Many of them know how to put a disk in a drive, and click next a few times. They don't know how to deal with C:\program files\world of warcraft\interface\addons, Zip files or anything of the sort. More knowledgeable people help them, install a few addons, maybe even WowMatrix or a similar program and show them how to click Update to keep things in order.

Insulting the end user is a common practice, but in the end it serves no purpose. There are people that were given instructions, and followed them, but don't know what exactly it was that they did. I guarantee you that every user in the forum, at one point in their computer-using lives, have done this.

Then why are they burdening WOWI/Curse with their cast-off project that has no business being distributed?

Actually this entire discussion is moot. This is October 2008 all over again.

http://forums.wowace.com/showthread.php?t=14361
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=18358
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...1&pageNo=23#33


People are simply months old on this subject. You can even watch in these threads as how WM was altering their application, during our discussions. I suggest that people take the time to go through all these threads and think long and hard if they have anything new to bring to the table. Nothing more needs to be said than what has been posted on those mega threads.

This is an argument as old as copyright, as old as money, as old as barter depending on just how you look at it.

You're right, though. Nobody's going to convince anyone of anything at this point. Addon authors insist they want to help WOWI/Curse by keeping their addons here, but clog the database and storage with addons they haven't updated since the dawn of time, and with Hello, World!-style addons that should've never passed through their router.

I've actually made it a habit of clicking on everyone's "Addon Author" pip, just to see what sort of atrocities were written by the people arguing this, and only one person that I've noticed (I'm sure I've missed someone) has more addons updated in the last 3 months than not (this author being Tristanian, as a matter of fact. Salut.).

I'm willing to bet that if WOWI/Curse were to cull these useless addons that no longer serve as even programming examples due to their age and obsolescence, they'd solve more issues due to a reduced search index and less storage used than they'll save by banning WowMatrix for a month.

And it's all moot anyway as their measures will inevitably be bypassed.

Why would a stable working addon need to be updated in the last three months? There's been no major changes to the UI code, no TOC updates between Nov and now, so a working addon (like mine) might not need any updates.

You assume that an addon that hasn't been updated every week is somehow non-functional, which just isn't true.

Preemptive preparation for 3.1, for starters. Updates, enhancements, bugfixes as further reasons.

I notice your only addon was updated yesterday. Why'd you do that?

There you go.

Well, some of the authors choose Curse as a place to "actively" update their addons, would be more precise to say actually WoWAce (the addons are only getting syndicated to Curse). Why ? I would reckon, it's mostly a matter of version control system. Usually, if you pick one, you stick with the supporting site, mostly due to technical reasons with the packager support. It's really not anything personal and most of us know each other anyway and don't hold it against each other :p

I do agree that both databases need some deal of cleanup, BUT, there are instances of addons that are still perfectly working and don't need updates (in all honesty a working addon doesn't need a .toc bump or something, I personally do it, to avoid support questions and save time). Best thing is to report a vastly outdated (and broken) addon and at least here on WoWI, I've personally witnessed that the response/evaluation is generally fast, in such an occasion.

So, I install Curse Client to see what the deal is.

It installs an addon that, as far as I can remember, it never asked permission to install.

At least it wasn't Weatherbug, I guess.

Author > User.

I'd wager that any addon pre-2007 could be safely culled. It'd be a hell of a task to go through and report ancient addons as broken, given the sheer number of them. It'd be nice if authors would self-police in that regard.

I acutally have to laugh at those who whine and moan that their guildies can't/won't update their AddOns if they don't have WoWMatrix. Why? Because I am known as the mod guru in my guild and I have persuaded my entire guild (A guild of about 400 odd players that range from clueless to total geeks), to NOT use WM. Instead most use either the Curse Client or they manually update. I have assisted in this effort by providing stable links to the AddOns we use on our forums. Those links only goto the AddOn's download page so my guildies will see the site's adverts (WoWI and Curse are one of a handful of site whom I allow to show adverts) and the donation button. I don't deep link directly to the file itself. I have in the past on really bad patch days, thrown together a quick AddOn pack and hosted it on Curse. Once the patch day had blown over, I would remove the mod pack as most of my guild mates had download it or did their own manual download. I did all the support on those mods in those AddOn packs, however I don't create AddOn packs anymore as both Curse and WoWI have put the infrastructure in place to handle Patch Day. Instead now I focus on actual UIs with quite a bit of custom code.

It's really not difficult to get a guild to update their mods without WM. If a guild member can't update without WM then that just speaks of pure laziness on the part of the player. My guild can't use the excuse of too busy to update as we are all working adults yet we still get our AddOn updates done without the use of WM and still have to time make another Sarth 3d run.

Authors have a number of incentives to control where their AddOns are distributed. These include things like centralized bug tracking systems (either via comments on Curse/WoWI or the ticket system used on CurseForge/WoWAce. Other incentives include easy donation pages and eventually on Curse, Author Rewards. As an artist and author myself, I want to control where my works are distributed from. WM and alternate download sites beyond the ones I have authorized do not benefit me in any way and in fact hurt me as I can't keep track of what is going with my work. Sure my one WoW AddOn is pretty old (it no longer works with WoW), however I am thinking of the future as I do have some projects in the works.

You're making my point for me.

I updated my addon because the game code changed. Up until today, it didn't need to be changed. To be honest, it didn't even need that; it would have worked just fine had you clicked the "Load out of date addons".

Not every addon needs updates, enhancements, and bugfixes. Some do what they are meant to do just fine, so they can go months without any changes.

You state it's really not difficult, then go on to say how you violate mod author's rights by creating an unauthorized compilation of addons, then rehost them on WOWI instead of distributing it privately.

Yet earlier I was given grief for intending to do the same thing, minus the rehosting on WOWI.

Your compilation and mine are in the same vein, failing to benefit the author in any way.

(I could be petty and state that deep linking to a particular addon is depriving WOWI of the ad revenue from views on the front page and search result pages, but that's just being silly ;) )

I love changelogs.

Care to go again?

-edit- I will concede a point here, though. I am using FancyBar, an addon from early 2007, that I haven't found as simple of a replacement for. It does throw errors with some regularity, though.

-final edit- Like I said, we're not going to convince the other they're wrong and change their ways here. I just felt the need to provide a counter-point to the backpatting here, and indeed initially I was posting out of sheer frustration - But not from the temporary loss of WowMatrix, and instead the inability to sleep. It's now 5AM, I need to be at work at 7AM, so I'm going to go pretend to sleep and hope the Patch Fairy gives me back Spiritual Attunement in 3.1.1. I'm sure there'll be celebrations that the mighty troll has been vanquished, but I hope people will at least consider (or reconsider) why they release addons in the first place - To be used. I tried more addons because they looked interesting in WowMatrix than I've ever bothered with across WOWI and Curse and WoWAce and CT and so on combined.

Most of them sucked.