Originally Posted by Elhana
I do not agree that temporary fixes should not be implemented at all - some addons may be broken for ages for different reasons, yet addon is still "maintained". Just search for "fan update" here and you'll see how many people actually putting their dirty hands into your cookies, even more if you look for hacks in comments.
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I wasn't talking about Fan Updates or hacks in comments. Both of those are highly visible and public. If I want a "fan update" I choose to download it. If it's a "hack in the comments" It's me making the choice to open the lua and put it in there.
I was talking about WM changes addon code without people's knowledge. Unless you know how to de compile wowmatrix's code from memory like Arrowmaster does then you have no idea that wow matrix is doing this. It's not decleared in any notes that WM displays anywhere. You're not notified that WM is doing so.
And yes this does create supirious versions of a mod - the latest version of a mod and the version the wow matrix "helpfully" altered. The addon author has no idea WM has altered his code so when he's trouble shooting problems people have he dosn't have the same code and thereby doesn't have the same version the person having a problem has.
Of course all of this isn't relevant anymore as WM have removed the function that did this. They removed it when they put up that little FAQ they responded to the block with.
Originally Posted by lilsparky
i think the underlying issue here is money and competition for ad revenue.
wowmatrix was the obvious target, but i'm wondering about what happens when they're finally gone. is wowi next? they are, afterall, competition for curse. the author rewards program from curse can be seen as being an effort to hoard addons.
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Well your first part of your argument is correct - servers don't run on sunshine and rainbows, bandwidth doesn't grow on trees. To be viable websites that will stay up they do need to be run as businesses.
And Businesses do need to have moneey coming in to pay the bills. Curse's estimated bandwidth bill for the month of April ? $75,000 (1) . They need to pay it somehow.
The second part of your argument isn't very valid - although there is a rivalry there between Curse and Wow interface , it's more of a friendly rivalry more then anything. They do have friendly relations with each other and do share certain things like tips on how to block wowmatrix and other addon site admin stuff.
If they wanted to drive wowinterface out of business all they needed to do would be to not tell this site about how they were going to block wowmatrix. Then all traffic that the WM users would normally be sending Curse would of been sent to this site instead. Do you think this site would of survived patch day with the extra bandwidth on patch day that Curse was doing ? I mean they were doing the bandwidth for both Thottbot and Wowhead combined on patch day (2) Search the URL in my footnotes for GB - they were doing an amazing amount of traffic on patch day. If they really wanted this site to go down that's all they needed to do (no dis respect intended towards Dolby tho
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As for the Premium program hording addons ? I don't buy it. There are a ton of other reasons why an author would publish to Wow interface and not Curse or both at the same time. An author makes a decision as to where to publish his or her addon and most of the time it's not where the money is leading them. Author tools , SVN , ease of publishing , quality of support ticket system, support forums , having more places people can download it from .... all are more valid reasons then getting a monetary cut out of it. And please note that with Curse's Premium program you can still download your addons for free through the client and through the website. They aren't preventing you from getting addons at all.
(1)
http://apt.rikers.org/%23curseforge/20081015.html.gz search for 75k
(2) see link as above search for wowhead