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Originally Posted by Meldas
Believe me, I know the names and websites (or portals) of all authors of each one of my addons and I appreciate their efforts. Some Addons are downright beautiful pieces of creativity and since I did myself (for me and my guild) some smaller Addons or adjustments of 'no longer supported' Addons I know how much effort it takes to do this stuff. They get detailed error reports, help in translation and sometimes I even make 'customer support' for them by answering questions in their forums.
All this while I still use WoWMatrix.
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Believe me, when I say that
you do not represent the entire AddOn user base for World of Warcraft. There are quite a few things about WoWMatrix opposed to site-provided Download Clients that make it not only wrong, but unfair to Authors.
1) WoWMatrix (in general) doesn't base it's AddOn availability on Author submissions alone (which is should). Any 'ol Joe can ask them to include an AddOn in their distribution base.
This is wrong! I (and other authors) gave
no one the rights to decide the distribution method(s) for my/our AddOns. If WoWMatrix worked on Author-based submissions alone, I would have much less of a problem with it. As it stands, they've directly stated to me that "People ask for AddOns, and we include it if it's requested". This goes about distribution of the AddOns in an absolutely backwards manner.
2) WoWMatrix circumvents not only Bandwidth & hosting issues, but also does not extend testing/scanning to ensure AddOns are safe. When an author uploads their AddOn to WoWInterface, you get a notice after hitting "submit" telling you that it will not be immediately available because Devs on the site scan/view the general contents of the AddOn to ensure there's nothing dangerous being uploaded to their server. This takes time, effort, and one can argue funding to make sure
every AddOn uploaded is looked at and confirmed to be safe for distribution. WoWMatrix leeches this security and simply distributes the content at the expense of other sites security measures.
I think we all know there are less-than-safe sites out there to get AddOns...myself being a victim of a bad Curse & WoWUI a few years back. What guarantee does WoWMatrix provide that ensures that -all- content it distributes is safe? Not cool...if you ask me.
3) The circumventing of bandwidth and hosting alone is enough to put up a fuss. But the fact that they do it "on top of" the things listed above "as well as" with no immediate contribution to the sites they leech, or any effort to identify them makes it worse. They are parasitic in nature and they don't go about it in a positive way. You can create scripts, and other manners of multi-site updating your AddOns and that's fine. It doesn't make WoWMatrix "A.O.K." for what they do.
I see a lot of "supporters" of WoWMatrix still agreeing to a lot of problems the Authors have with it's distribution methods. It boggles me that people don't understand that WoW AddOns are an "author based community" that directly receives it's contributions from willing authors to release their work that they've provided their own time, effort, and creativity for free.
It's disheartening to see a bunch of AddOns users band together in support of something that a lot of authors directly feel is unjust to their work, and do so without considering the fact that they wouldn't have the AddOns in the first place if the authors hadn't put as much effort in creating and maintaining them. The authors choice in distribution is what matters, and it's the rule that should be followed...regardless of how
you feel you should be allowed to update your AddOns. Don't bite the hand that feeds...