Originally Posted by nobgul
I have noticed that alot of addon authors are not maintaining their addons on multiple sites, when they used to. I would rather see a app that allows the author to upload to the various sites with 1 click rather then a module for the curse client. But this is just my look at it.
|
Er...no, thanks.
Generally, authors want a lot of exposure for their mods to make the greatest number of people happy -- nothing like seeing jumps in your download numbers to make you smile, the little notes of thanks, or the number of annoyed people when something breaks (sure, 200 people are grumpy but, HEY, 200 people are using your work!).
Hosting a mod on 3 sites is, let's be frank here, not a big deal in-and-of itself. It adds about 5 minutes to the time it takes to release an update since it's the same .zip file, the same update note, and (most of the time) the same markup for any major changes. It's only annoying when you have to do it 3-4 times in a day or two after release to work out kinks -- and that's easily solved, if it's an issue at all, by using a primary site and filling in after you're certain it's stable.
The issue is this: unless you're one of the plethora of unresponsive authors who generally make the user community miserable, you will check frequently (every couple of days at minimum) to see what your users have gotten up to, what problems or questions they have, and respond to them. To do this, you have to visit those sites.
If you are visiting those sites to check on the work you host there, hosting it there obviously isn't an issue since you'll spend more time in a month talking to users than you will updating 2 extra sites on release day.
Being able to u/l to 3 sites with 1 click is cute...but no more than cute. This is
not why some authors only host on two of the big three, or only on one of them.
Hosting work on a site will generally generate some level of traffic for the site which means you are earning them money. I'm happy to host my work here on WoW Interface because it has a good and responsive staff, software that adequate to the task (even if it is
occasionally annoying), and a user community of which I'm happy to be a part.
I refuse to ever host a mod on wowui again, due to the
atrocious user-community there, multi-hosting is not a barrier. They have not earned my trust or the traffic hosting my work there might generate for them.
I refuse to host anything on Curse any longer because they kept making maintaining an addon there more and more of a chore, more and more about $$ and less and less about users or authors. I still, regretfully, have to nab a few mods from there and damn if they don't make
that an annoying, multi-step problem as well. They have not earned my trust or the traffic hosting my work there might generate for them. The traffic I'd drive to their site may only be .002 cents a year but, damn it, that's .002 cents a year
they didn't earn.
I'd rather my fractional pennies of financial impact go to WoW Interface. They put in the effort to earn it at the author and user levels, where they should: they worry about us, we can worry about their bottom line.