Originally Posted by Cairenn
Guice, I have to admit, from having known you and worked with you (so to speak) for as many years as I have, I have been absolutely flabbergasted and hurt at the way you've been attacking us as a whole and me personally.
|
Aww. Now you're making me feel bad. Anyway. It was the heat of the moment. Mostly cause the "reasons" list I initially read in the first post was very ... um ... should I say "sympathy" oriented. Everything listed wasn't "illegal" or "wrong" except the "remotely hosting user's add-ons." The moment somebody uses a sympathy argument on me, I grow cold. My apologies, again. It's a personality trait of mine I don't wish to remove.
Originally Posted by Cairenn
It wasn't a bluff. It wasn't a "fine, I'm taking my ball and going home". It was me saying that the end result, as far as the WM users were concerned, would be the same. We block WM, their users can't download from this site. We go out of business because we can't pay the bills that they incurred, their users can't download from our site. In the first case, we're being vilified. Why? Would we be equally vilified in the second? If we went out of business, would everyone still be all mad at us?
Yet in the first case, the users CAN still get the mods from our site, because we are still in existence. So why are we being vilified?
|
Why? It's because I don't believe its "WM's fault." They were accessing publicly accessible links. They were going around the HTML for the users to provide them an extremely efficient way of updating their add-ons. The WM builders saw an opportunity, and they took it. The response, over a year later, is "ban them." Yes, I read that you've attempted to contact them. But, again, I don't blame WM for using what's already available. It's just an oversight in the original design of the whole site.
Why do we create captchas? Why do some sites force people to register before they can download? Why do we create sites asking for an email, then emailing a time limited link to download some application?
All these are attempts to prevent bots from scanning, siphoning, or automating tasks we expect a human of doing. There are certainly tasks that cannot be done if we required a person to verify themselves around every turn. For these tasks, you have to either play nice with bots, or play mean with people. You can't go the other way on either of them -- it's a lose/lose situation. It's the nature of the internet! You don't know who's a bot and who's human. I think it's a benefit. Naturally others see this as an issue.