(Edit: To everyone that is wondering wtf?! about this post, I am answering someone from elsewhere but the site I am answering from won't let me post the number of links, etc, so I'm needing to post it here.)
[Insert quote from other site here, to which I'm responding]:
Hi XXXX,
Now that you have stopped screaming and may actually be willing to have a dialogue ...
You say we gave no warning. I’d ask you to consider all of these various threads and posts:
Oct ’07
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=13164
Where is he pulling the mods from? I notice that on the site the links are pointing back to the site. Is he going around and manually getting updated mods from the various sites and uploading them himself, or ? If he is, that's a violation of mod author copyright. If not, where are they coming from? This is the first I've heard of it, and given how many authors I talk to every single day, I'd think I'd know about a new site that they are uploading to.
Also, unless the authors are updating them themselves, how do we know that those are the most recent versions of X? Again, where is he getting them?
I have no problem with there being another site out there, don't get me wrong. I just want to make sure that no copyright is being violated and that people are getting what is advertised.
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It's the same thing that gets authors annoyed every time a new site or updater or whathaveyou pops up. Violation of author copyright. Unless the author specifically states that you are free to download and do whatever you wish with their mod, no one has the right to do anything other than use the mod for personal use. That includes redistribution. And as someone who has been fighting on the side of authors for a very long time now, it annoys me too. Mods are copyright unless explicitly stated as not, from the moment they are written. It's the same as a piece of artwork or a book or a song or ... It is the intellectual and artistic property of the author/artist and has copyright protection. Period.
That is why you will never find any of our staff uploading mods ourselves, and if we discover users uploading someone else's mods, we delete the mod immediately and warn the user that they are in violation of mod author copyright and the rules of our site(s). If they do it a second time they are immediately banned from the site.
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Apr ’08
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...9833#post89833
No, we won't be pulling from other sites for a couple of reasons:
a) that is violation of author copyright (redistribution) - if they want us to be able to distribute their mods for them, they upload here;
b) because the authors aren't uploading to it themselves it isn't current, so authors get users b!tching at them about bugs that they've already fixed and users are getting old versions that may have problems;
c) you don't go pulling from someone else's site without their permission (see a), plus the fact that it takes away their page views and ad impressions, all of which are big no nos.
Other apps do these things, but we won't. I know it is less than convenient for our users, for which I'm sorry, but to do otherwise wouldn't be moral, ethical or legal. Sorry. =/
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Sept ’08
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=18358
Oct ’08
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...209#post104209
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We are not finished trying to protect our downloads (yes, we have been trying to prevent wowmatrix from accessing them, as noted in a quote above), but we would also like to do it in a way so as not to inconvenience our users.
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Oct ’08
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=18563
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Don't plan on getting your updates from wowmatrix any time soon. They do not have a good reputation with any of the addon sites and most of the authors, and are being blocked.
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Oct ’08
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=18670
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Request block, This is to stop flooding of our server.
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This was enabled to keep our site alive during patch week. Our 1 main httpd server couldnt handle all the page requests. We are working to scale our server setup for the next big patch day.
The main reason we couldnt handle it was because wowmatrix would slam our fileinfo pages to parse them for the version info and download link. With people having 50+ addons and thousands using it every time before they load wow our poor server was having major trouble. So we added some flood control that wouldnt affect the majority of the people using our site.
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No, its when wowmatrix is used. Every one of their users has a different IP and their program has a random user agent.
I had to re-enable the flood control again, trying to figure out my options.
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yes, wowmatrix hammers our file info page acting like a ddos attack.
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(We've actually had our datacenter shut us down once because of WM, they thought we were under a DDOS attack.)
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We have thought of both ideas, Duugu. [b]We're figuring out what's best for the site atm, to not burden users.
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While this is an obvious solution, it's also a solution that would be against what we prefer due to the extra burden it places on the users. The objective here is to find a resolution without actually impacting the frequent users of the site that we <3 so much
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It may have to come down to something like that, however I've been trying to avoid that.
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Oct ’08
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=18804
Part of a news post to authors, on the front page of the site (community tab):
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Next, we have instituted a new policy on the site. Some of you have already been apprised of it in PMs, but here's the public announcement. We will not allow any mods on the site that have any Wowmatrix files in them. If you submit a mod that has such files in them, we will send you a PM asking you to remove those files before we will approve it. This is not open for debate. We aren't getting into the whole "what's wrong with Wowmatrix, blah blah blah" stuff. It's been discussed plenty elsewhere and our stance remains the same.
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[Insert quote from other site here, to which I'm responding]:
Apr ’09
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=22789
15. Then why did you block WowMatrix when you didn’t have a viable alternative?
Simply put, we didn’t have an alternative. (This is NOT to lay blame on them, so please don’t go taking it out of context.) Curse was in a position where they were ready to block WowMatrix. They were going to be going ahead whether we did or not. If we didn’t do it at the same time, our site would have simply been crushed under the load, since it would have all fallen on us instead of being split between the two sites the way it was before. So we had two choices. We could block them, even though our updater isn’t ready, and still have our site be usable to anyone that wanted to come to the site; or we could not block them and just have our site be down completely, thereby making it so that no one could get to our site at all. We could wish our updater had been ready, so that we had a viable alternative to offer you, but see #14.
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[Insert quote from other site here, to which I'm responding]:
We’ve never claimed it was brand spanking new. We have said, in fact, that we’ve been working on it for quite a while now.
And from the WowAce forums:
Oct ’07
http://forums.wowace.com/showthread....ight=wowmatrix
Apr ’08
http://forums.wowace.com/showthread....ight=wowmatrix
Jul ’08
http://forums.wowace.com/showpost.ph...88&postcount=5
Oct ’08
http://forums.wowace.com/showthread....ight=wowmatrix
Oct ’08
http://forums.wowace.com/showthread....ight=wowmatrix
Oct ’08
http://forums.wowace.com/showthread....ight=wowmatrix
There’s lots more you can find on both sites, along with posts on official Blizz forums, on Curse, no doubt on wowui.incgamers.com, on …
What more would you have us do? What other way could we have "warned" you? It's not like there are WowMatrix forums that we could go post on, to warn you it was about to happen. No mailing list. What more can we do than post on our sites and on the official forums? And we've been doing that for almost a year and a half now, warning that authors and hosting sites didn't like them and that we were all trying to protect ourselves from them. So what would you have us do?
It sucked. I agree completely. I wish it hadn’t been necessary. I’ve said that from the outset. If you read the posts that
I have made in this thread, you will see me saying over and over that we wished something else could have been done, and also agreeing that WowMatrix was (mostly) a nice little program for end users. (I say “mostly” because there are things it was/is doing to end-users that it really shouldn’t be doing, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)