[Petrah]

Originally Posted by Seerah WoWInterface and Curse hate their users! That is so far from the truth that it makes us shake our heads. Anyone who has been around either of the sites know better. I used to work in retail. If our shrink rates were too high from shoplifting, that meant our store was in big trouble. Anyone who works retail knows that the store cannot recoup losses from shoplifting. The store/company purchase products to place in their store for people to buy. If that stuff is stolen instead, the store cannot get their money back for those items. In order to make up for that their usually have to raise prices or increase security. This doesn't mean that they hate their shoppers. It means that they are trying to protect themselves and keep themselves afloat so that the shoppers can rest assured that their favorite store will still be there tomorrow. Why did you do this right before the patch? It wasn't to spite users. See above for that. Anyone that visited our site (or Curse) for the last few patches are aware of the troubles we had in keeping it up. Our datacenter has shut down our servers in the past for wowmatrix looking like a DDOS attack (we didn't shut it down, the datacenter did). That combined with the natural demands on us during a patch day have made our site crash and time out for users. This makes it no fun for users. Why yesterday instead of last week? 1. Because it takes time to put this stuff together. 2. Because if we did it last week, wowmatrix may have hacked their way around our protections (wouldn't be the first time) and we'd have overloaded sites again on patch day. Now, ask yourself which is better? A site that you can get to for your addons or a site that you (even wowmatrix) can't? Your accusations against WowMatrix are unfounded! I am sorry, but they are not. Earlier in this thread were 3-4 linked threads about wowmatrix from last fall. If you wish, I could probably dig up 20 more going back to the first day that they started stealing from addon sites and declared that they "wanted a cut of the market". They were met with hostility that day on the wowace forums (about a year and a half ago or so) because they weren't an addon hosting site, they were thieves. They were scraping the wowace repository and rehosting those addons (many of them were outdated versions). Please educate yourself before accusing us of slander. Why don't you work together with WowMatrix? We have tried to contact them. Curse has tried to contact them. One day, WM and Curse actually did talk about a possible deal. WowMatrix offered them a mere fraction of the costs they cause Curse in order to keep doing what they were doing. When Curse said, "wait, no - you cause us to spend 20 times that on bandwidth," wowmatrix basically gave them the finger and ignored them again. At this point, we find it morally reprehensible to try to work out a deal with someone that has absolutely no respect for us, Curse, the authors, or the community. All wowmatrix wants is their "cut of the market" - they have *never ever* been a part of the community, tried to work things out respectfully with the addon sites, or been a part of discussions with users/authors. Having users visit your site will cause more bandwidth than WowMatrix uses. While it may seem like the truth, it isn't. You vastly underestimate the bandwidth that is consumed moving addons, and the number of users WowMatrix had that were hammering our site, scraping pages. As has been already noted, our data center has shut down our servers on several occasions because they thought we were under DDOS attacks. We were actually just being hammered by WowMatrix users. Curse's bandwidth usage went down by 30% when they cut off WM yesterday, and WoWInterface's went down by 50%. Sure, now those users will be visiting the sites. But the key here is this: NOT in as high of a frequency. And, yes, we'll stil get our ad views and our page impressions. We need those to stay alive. Don't you want us to still be here? Ultimately, our site will still be up and running for you to actually get your addons now. Both on a server load basis and and for the future basis. Were other alternatives considered before this? Of course - this isn't the easiest route, you know. Anything we tried to put into place before to limit wowmatrix's usage, they would just hack their way around it. Any time we tried to talk to them, they either ignored us or insulted us. We tried to ignore them for a time, too. But the costs just got too great. We are talking about TERABYTES of data here for bandwidth usage. You can't even imagine the costs that places on websites. Why do authors care so much? Is this really about them, too? I am saying all of this as an addon author myself: 95% of all addons were written because the author thought it would be a neat thing for them themselves to have for the game. Probably only about 70-75% of all addons are released to distribution sites. And this is usually only because the author has a sense of pride in what they have accomplished and wish to share it with others in case they might like it too. Many authors don't even care if users use their addons. What the authors *do* care about, though, is feeling like they have some sort of control over their addons and what they create. This is precisely why addons have licenses. Oh - and btw - an addon without a license means that the addon is "all rights reserved". The actual presence of a license is what allows people to do stuff with it. Addons are *not* Open-Source unless a license declares it so. Just because you can read it in NotePad, doesn't mean it's Open-Source. The authors also wish to help take care of the real addon sites that have taken care of them. If wowi and curse go down the drain, we'd be sad authors. Why didn't you wait until the new WoWI updater was ready? Believe me, that would have been icing on the cake. Unfortunately, sometimes things in life don't work out the way that you want them to. Life is messy and complicated. Shirik has been so very busy with his school and getting an internship for the summer, he has hardly slept much the past few months - often staying up until early hours of the morning working on his studies or the updater. He just hasn't been able to get it finished yet. The alpha version is very promising and works fairly well, but there are still a few kinks to work out before it is ready for public consumption. But we could not wait on the WowMatrix thing. We wanted the peace of mind that the site would be up and available for users, and that we wouldn't have to call Dolby at all hours of the day or night telling him to restart the server ASAP because it had crashed. We are not exaggerating here. If you did not see the issues during the last few patches, you were lucky and we were fast at catching them. Dolby worked his ass off. Why don't WoWInterface and Curse work together to create an updater? While we agree that that would be nice for the users, and in a perfect world, you might see the Curse-WoWI Updater, this is not a perfect world. While we did work together on this (I likened it to the WotLK expansion on the forums), we are still competitors. What I can say is that our new updater will be able to use any modules written for it - even one for Curse if someone writes it. I am sure that I am forgetting responses to some things, but I have been sitting here at my desk longer than I was supposed to already, and it has been about an hour and you deserve to see my response and to have the thread unlocked again for discussion. I am sorry for having to lock it, and I am sorry for having to temp ban some of you. But sometimes ugly things need to be done. I hope the hour gave a few of you time to cool off as well. Please, please follow the site rules when replying to this thread and keep things civil and level headed. While we don't ask you to agree with what was done, we do ask you to understand where we were coming from and to respect that. Make use of the favorites on both sites. You can set it up to be emailed if an addon is updated. You won't even have to come looking.

Don't beat me, Seerah. Just thought this should be bumped again.

/hides