Back to the idea of startup sites announcing their... startup...

IMO, there is a HUGE difference between...

PM to Cairenn:
...and...

Straight to forums:

You got me with phat lootz.

I thought I would. ;)

You realize it's still a fucken dick move to list someones addon without the author's name.

Hehe, depends on the license ;)
By accident they followed my PIY-License to the point skipping my name :P

And looking at the file name I'm sure they leeched it from curse.com through recent-list :)

Either these people are full of sh*t or they're just incompetent, as a number of my addons have reappeared on their site. I sent a formal complaint to their web host this time in addition to posting on their forum again. :mad:

There is the distinct possibility they could be both.

All the addons (except for tiny's) *still* have "Unknown" listed as their authors... /sigh

Well, seeing as how they still don't have the ability for addon authors to do anything on the site, I can't say I'm surprised. :rolleyes:

I like big loot and I cannot lie... (that's it for my rap career).

The latest, and obv still flawed version of what is being used to acquire such things does its best to acquire the authors name, and respect licenses (obv this part needs some work).

You'll notice that some addons do list the full spectrum of contributors to the addon.

I hope to have all addons appropriately labeled with their respective authors ASAP followed by the ability for authors to manage their addons, the only reason this isn't done yet is I simply need more hours in the day.

Ide like to make a argument against being incompetent, but I think that would be pointless. I can however ensure you that we do care, especially myself, and unfortunately there have been more oversights while burning the midnight oil.

p.s. I know none of this is any of your problems, but as I said before, trying to be transparent.

*braces for impact*

Fixed it for you.

If you truly want to be legit, you need to pull every single addon that does not have a license that permits you to redistribute without prior approval down off your site. Then you make it so that authors can upload to your site if they so wish. Anything else is still completely unethical, not to mention actually illegal.

Every addon which is accessible should be in complete compliance with their licenses. Obviously there was the incident earlier, but at this time they should all comply, and we are double and triple checking to prevent further incidents.

Even rehosting GPL addons if the authors don't want them there seems like a pretty big faux pas if you want to be a legitimate part of the addon community. Rather than putting your obviously extremely limited time toward improving your Curse scraping bot, why not spend that time building features that people actually want? Enabling addon authors to directly manage their addons on your site, even if all they can do is edit the description and upload a file, seems like it should be your #1 priority.

Scraping and rehosting without permission -- even if the license technically allows it -- seems like a bad strategy for long-term success. It gives the impression that you don't care about working with addon authors, and that all you do care about is pulling more visitors to your site by any means possible to increase ad impressions. Even if that's not the case, that's how it looks, and the longer you keep it up, the less chance you have of ever redeeming your site in the addon community.

Frankly I'd say at this point you're already doomed to failure -- even if you suddenly had a full suite of tools for addon authors tomorrow, after the way you've handled your first steps, I doubt many addon authors would even bother giving you a chance -- but if you really want to proceed with building a legitimate addon site, you are Doing It Wrong.

If the authors don't want them there we will remove them. Torhal had expressed while his license allowed for hosting, he did not want it hosted, and we promptly removed it.

Either way, your post is very constructive and i appreciate you continuing to be constructive in our correspondence. All along I've been working towards supporting manual addon management by authors, now is no different, and I hope to have something for everyone very soon.

I agree, now is no different. Nearly 3 months and not one useful author targeted feature has been added.

It kind of shows where your priorities reguarding authors are placed, in the room marked WC.

I've never heard of a productive partnership starting off with one partner firmly planting their middle didgit in the others nose and then refusing to remove it. Then again, maybe you're hoping for a world first, good luck.

This tired old excuse again? Have you notified all the authors that you have kidnapped their addons and are holding them ransom for the price of one email (I hope it would only be one) requesting you hand back their hard work? I doubt it because,

So the longer you hold off doing something the longer you believe you don't have to let them know.

I dislike the opt-out approach to these things. It create a lot of work for me to constantly go around on different sites and ask them to take down my things. I think a better approach is opt-in where authors get a mail with a list of addons someone else wishes to host on their site, with some options and such.

Yep. If your bot can scrape addons and all their metadata from Curse, it could send a PM to the author on Curse with little additional work. This could get your account banned as a spammer on the site, but there's probably less of a risk with this type of PM than if you were sending out generic "hey everyone check out our site" messages.

You're also hosting less than 200 addons, with probably less than 50 authors represented. It wouldn't take you that long to go through the addons by hand and look for contact information. All my addons, for example, list my email address in their TOC and README files.

Finally, the fact that you're still not even showing addon author names really gives a bad impression. Curse displays this information in the same standardized format it displays all the other metadata you're apparently having no difficulty in scraping, so what's the problem with author names? :(

Yeah you're right, but some licesnse strictly forbid to rehost the program without publishing the author's name too.

I mean how hard would it be to manually edit author names for thoose less then 100 addons, and disable the failed sync for it.

I also would like to remove Gladius and Gladius v3 then.