Due to the recent changes here on WoWI and over at Curse regarding the disabling of WowMatrix (which I 100% support, btw) many other updaters were broken (also not a bad thing overall). With this I'd like to make a suggestion that would do two things:
- Give back to the sites that these updaters pulled data from, and
- Decrease their overall use and increase the use of the respective sites official updater.
I propose any user that has a premium subscription get access to a code of some sort that allowed their account the ability to download addons via any updater that used the site's API. Restrictions could be put in place to only allow a defined amount of addons to be updated based on subscription level, or only allow "update all" options to exist for an additional fee.
Obviously this isn't going to increase the amount of people that subscribe but it gives people who do subscribe, or that are willing to subscribe for such a thing, an option other than using the sites updater or manually installing their addons.
As you may have guessed, this will deter the user of third-party updaters a little because not everyone can or will subscribe just to do something they can manually in a browser (actually judging by the amount of people whining because they now have to do this I'm not so sure this comment is true!). Which means either users will go to the sites to get their updates or will use the site's updater. In all cases everyone wins.
Keep in mind that the actual API should be public to use. Certain features of the API, however, can only be activated if the user using the updater that is using the API (weee) has a premium subscription.
Some things the API could do:
- Provide easy to access information about addons. Addon name, author name, version numbers, change logs, etc. (non-premium feature)
- Allow downloading of addons (premium feature)
- Provide a standard means for updaters to include donation info for addon authors, if the author choose to utilize the donation feature on the site. (non-premium feature)
Note: To get the change log portion of the addon information to be at all useful, authors would have to start really maintaining their change log tabs and only cram in actually changes and not to-do lists, known bugs, and future ideas (perhaps new tabs could be created for these purposes?).
Keep in mind the list above is not all inclusive, and can be modified to work better for the site.
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I will be updating this post as this thread develops to better push this idea forward.