WowAce - Curse - WUU Updater - Future?

[Benea]

I've moved over here now. Expect Benea UI compilations post 3.0 patch (once the addons don't act all crazy) posted somewhere in here instead of ace forums.

I might (*might*) actually get off my lazy behind and get an upload page here instead of filefront. =p

edit: And I got some really crude WAR UI compilation too =p

[Scalebane]

So is a new WOWI updater in the works? (think i heard something about that)

I think i'm pretty much just gonna stick with this site, easy updating even if i have to manually do it, just really dislike curse and reading the wowace forums they seem to be getting rather uptight about users being there, so i don't wanna be where i'm not wanted, so much for a community at that place.

[Seerah]

Well, wowace started as a developer community for addon authors and Ace devs to have a place to discuss the framework. It was forums and an svn repo only (maybe the wiki?). Then they added the files page so that the authors/devs and their alpha/beta testers could have an easier way of downloading the few files on the svn.

Word got out to other authors that the ace forums were a good place to get help with their code, and if they wanted to use the framework, they could put their files on the svn, too. So, more addons were on the files page, and more authors were using the forums. Release versions of the addons were supposed to be pushed to release sites (like here or Curse) - wowace was just a developer location, and what was on the files page were alpha/beta versions of mods.

Then word got out that there were a few really cool addons on that files page for download. Users started using the files page to download mods. When they had problems with them (which they did, because they weren't release versions), they went to the wowace forums to ask for support. The developer forums now had to support mods, too. More people found wowace, more addons were added to the svn, more users came looking for new mods. But it was still fairly well understood that these were alpha/beta quality addons, and the users expected bugs, and they helped beta test, debug, put in new features, etc.

To aid people with beta-testing these *non-release* versions of their addons/libraries, WAU was created to help them update to the latest versions easier. Everything snowballed from there. Suddenly, users were in love with the one-click updater, with absolutely no regard for the quality of addons on the other side or the cost of the bandwidth to funnel their new obsession with updates to them. Users begged authors to put mods on wowace just so that it could be updated at the click of a button, and more authors flocked there because of the *developer* support community and how people could commit to others' projects for bug fixes, translations, etc.

WoWInterface hosted Ace for over two years, with not a single ad on the site. Eventually Kaelten took Ace off WoWInterface's servers. Then WoWAce could no longer survive on the funds it had. Kaelten was forced often to pay bandwidth costs out of his own pocket. When Kaelten asked for donations hardly anyone donated, so he stopped asking. When ads were put in WAU to help fund some users' crack habit of updating, there was a revolt. By that time, Kaelten had taken up a position with Curse, who also helped him out by paying for the cost to keep wowace up and running.

The snowball kept building. As of the close of the wowace svn last week, there were over 1600 addons on the svn. That is not including severely old mods that weren't even shown on the files page/WAU any longer, nor anything in the branches repo which some people downloaded manually with svn clients. The wowace forums had over 10,000 accounts. You don't even want to imagine the monthly costs for providing all of that - especially on patch days. If I remember correctly, wowace topped a *Terabyte* in one day for 2.4. That is 1024GB. To put that in perspective, my photobucket account (hosting my sig below) allows me 25GB in one *month*.

For a long time, it had been noted that change was needed for wowace. I saw it, too. You can go back and search the forums, and you will see threads from a year or two ago with people talking about what was needed to help keep wowace alive. Finally, something happened. Now, wowace will never be in need of funds to keep its doors open. Now, Kaelten can be paid to keep the doors open to the website that he loves. Now, not everyone agrees with the change. But everyone agrees that something had to be done. If you think things were perfect before, then you just had no clue, tbh.

As for getting rid of users from wowace, remember that there are two different levels of users. There are users that understand the notion of alpha/beta versions and what it means to beta test and give feedback. These are called "power users." There are also users that just liked some of the mods that wowace provided them, and they just wanted to download the mod and play the game. These are just regular users. Like my husband and I, I belong to the first group, he to the second. He would much rather be able to have stable releases (which will be pushed to Curse now, from wowace) and have no errors when he logs into the game for a raid. I love trying new things, even if they're broken or only half implemented. I give feedback, bug reports, dig into the code...

In all honesty, that second group of users never belonged on wowace in the first place. It was never ever meant as a release site, and wasn't built that way. WAU made users and authors lazy - authors stopped "releasing" their addons to release sites because it was too easy to just leave it on WAU, and users didn't want to look anywhere else because it was too easy to click one button to update. Now, it's as simple as setting a version in the toc file to a certain format to get a mod pushed from wowace to Curse, so authors can still be lazy. Regular users can make sure they get only release versions of those addons from Curse. Power users can still check out bleeding-edge versions of their favorite mods for testing from the wowace site.

I won't lie to you - I, personally, preferred WAU to the Curse Client, and I prefer wowi to Curse (no, I'm not being biased - I'm smod here *because* I like wowi ). Some authors will pick up and leave wowace so that their mods do not end up on the Curse site. Like I said, not everyone agree with the change that was made. But I hope I have provided insight into why it was done, and how long it had it coming, and why wowace is, and will always be, a developer community.

[Seerah]

Originally Posted by Scalebane So is a new WOWI updater in the works? (think i heard something about that) I think i'm pretty much just gonna stick with this site, easy updating even if i have to manually do it, just really dislike curse and reading the wowace forums they seem to be getting rather uptight about users being there, so i don't wanna be where i'm not wanted, so much for a community at that place.

Yes, a new updater is in a works, though we have no timeline on when it will be finished. But expect good things from it.

[Dreadlorde]

^.^

Yay.

And good story Seerah, it summed pretty much everything up.

[Tristanian]

Originally Posted by Seerah Yes, a new updater is in a works, though we have no timeline on when it will be finished. But expect good things from it.

Giev sneak preview !!!

[Kaelten]

Hey guys, just wanted to interject.

I didn't and don't force anyone to be where they don't want to be.

I made the post on wowace of what was happening months ago. Due to issues with the old site I didn't have a list of authors emails, so I did the best I can.

And as I posted over in the wowace forums, the numbers in seerah's post are actually underestimating.

Also, the curse client no longer requires auto updating, and we're also looking at making the profiler more of an opt in process. Curse has changed a lot (and for the better) in the last two years I've been working for them.

[Arindelle]

Thank you Seerah especially I understand a little better now.

Basicly I used a javabased updater JwowUpdater primarily to recommend to my guildmates as a simpleway to keep their mods up to date. (and not slow down our pulltimes especially with arffmyUI/deco/reco/ in chat permanently. In java this seemed to me a good multi-platform decision which resepcted authors rights (including a manual key in for non-ace mods --> can be used to re-drect to curse or WoWInt or WoWUI)

I realise now that this does steal some bandwith from the parent sites however.

I really love this site, and have not been a Curse fan for the last two years. But that is beside the point. I like the idea of getting the mod form their source.

I would like to recommend the "authors" website of choice to my guildmates - the site which the author recommends and would be updated first. If the mods are on curse tacitly transferred over, AND also here as an exemple -- how do I find THE link? Where do I tell them to go? To compare version numbers for ech add, look for a post from each author seems very daunting to me.

Regardless of a manual, direct dl or an updater which respects "authors consent" (by the way, WoWmatrix I have "condemned" on our french site).

As I understand it, aceaddons have been moved to curse ok. I understand the reasons better now. But as this transition completes, some developers will stay with curseforge, others may not. Recommendations?

[ShadowEric]

Wowace and Curseforge are developers' websites. Being part of the Curse network, whatever project tagged on either site gets pushed to Curse. Arindelle, this is where I told my guild to go. For the most part, they belong to the "stable" add-on crowd and don't really need/care about/understand the rest.

The only other website I recommended was this one.

I also strongly advised against wowmatrix.

As to auto-updating, I guess I will eventually recommend the Curse Client. It does need to get better at matching (although it seems it's a lot better as of the latest version), and I did warn them about the Profiler. Sounds like it needs to get a more user-friendly interface too (as in, it can be confusing at times, I'm told).

I don't quite understand the hate against Curse to be honest. The bandwidth issues have been explained. Having wowace/CF for the devs, and Curse for users is actually a good thing as it should push regular users away from the devlopers' communities. Also saw some concerns over trojans on Curse. As I recall, most sites have had issues with that, not just them. And as far as the site itself goes, perhaps it wasn't made clear enough by the Curse team, but it's a new team with a new website (it just launched) running on a completely new backend, much more robust. Or so I gather. It's a different Curse now.

That doesn't make it perfect, nor does it make wowinterface worse. It's just an alternative. It's a bit harsh to hate without giving a chance imo. And I have no preference or affiliation to either site, so trust me, I'm unbiased.

The only valid disagreement (valid in my eyes anyway, the rest really seems like bickering, sorry to say) is the Profiler being opt-out and not opt-in, but we should also all remember that sites like thottbot, wowhead and Curse's wowdb rely on us for data. And god knows we like those websites, don't we ? So let's not bite the hand that feeds us either... As to security concerns, if you use the same password on curse and others as you do in wow, well... you reap what you sow. Besides, the only way to be truly secure is to be offline. I don't see why I'd have a reason to think Curse is ill-intentioned and is going to use my info. They need us after all.

I'll keep using this site and theirs for my add-ons, I just might have to work for them a little more until the Curse updater gets better. Not really a huge deal for me, I like to be in control of my add-ons, even when I used WAU.

My 2 cents.

[Slakah]

I don't quite understand the hate against Curse to be honest.

The website is damn ugly and hard to navigate.

[Gemini_II]

Thank you Seerah and Kaelten for your explanations and reasoning.

Being a "power user" I, of course, loved the bleeding-edge of wowace and will miss it. I also understand and foresaw that something needed to change, and change it has done. I say that's good. I honestly hope many of those authors that hosted there come over to MMOUI/WoWI, but it's their choice.

I won't touch the CurseUpdater yet until some of the features Kaelten mentioned (like absence of Profiler, auto-anything option) are included though. Curse no longer hosts compilations so it doesn't affect me, but I haven't been fond of the last couple incarnations:

Originally Posted by Slakah The website is damn ugly and hard to navigate.

[Shefki]

Originally Posted by Slakah The website is damn ugly and hard to navigate.

What's ugly is a personal preference. Both sites have strengths and weaknesses. I update both, try to read comments on both.

The biggest issue with Curse has been the inability to handle the load. They claim to have resolved this. I guess we'll all find out in a week or so.

[PProvost]

A light deviation from the main topic of the thread, but one I've been pondering...

As a CurseForge author ("migrated" from Ace), I've been wondering about how I might automate my publication from CF to wowi.

Any thoughts from you guys about a way of enabling that? Something to make it easier for me to push updates to my addons to my wowi page for that addon?

Keep it manual for the first page (approval and all that), but being able to script up a publication when I release would enable me, the addon author, to put my stuff here as easily as it flows onto Curse.com.

[Seerah]

Currently, there is no way to move things from the wowace svn to wowi. I honestly don't remember if they were hoping to implement something like that or not... For now, there is the WoWI Mod Uploader (not updater) or you can use the wowi svn and push from there.

[Tristanian]

Originally Posted by PProvost A light deviation from the main topic of the thread, but one I've been pondering... As a CurseForge author ("migrated" from Ace), I've been wondering about how I might automate my publication from CF to wowi. Any thoughts from you guys about a way of enabling that? Something to make it easier for me to push updates to my addons to my wowi page for that addon? Keep it manual for the first page (approval and all that), but being able to script up a publication when I release would enable me, the addon author, to put my stuff here as easily as it flows onto Curse.com.

The easiest way by far, is retain an SVN copy of your addons on the WoWI SVN, simply replicate your check-ins, use the "Make Zip" function, copy/paste release notes (if applicable) and push it live. Approval will still be required, but you shouldn't have to worry much about it.

That or either, manually upload the stable/published zip from Curse.

To the best of my knowledge there isn't an automated, make-it-all configuration file (yet), through Cairenn (maybe even Seerah/Shirik) can probably elaborate more on that.


P.S : Don't be lazy (no offense intended )
P.S2: Seerah beat me to it, God dangit !

[PProvost]

Yeah, I know I can do it manually from ZIPs. That wasn't my point. If there were a reasonably way to push the ZIPs up to wowi, I would use it with every tag I do on the CF site.

I'll take a look at WOWIUPLOADER and see how it looks. Might just have to script it the old fashioned way.

[jinleileiking]

personally, i love Wowinterface updater!!!!!

Curse client is not free?????

Rediculus...

[septor]

Originally Posted by jinleileiking personally, i love Wowinterface updater!!!!! Curse client is not free????? Rediculus...

Funny thing is; it is 100% free. You don't have to lean to one side to pull out your credit card to send one cent. You can update all your addons, for free, whenever you want. There is, however, a premium account that allows you to update all your addons in the click of one button.

There's more to the game than the title screen. You should really press start before you review it.

[Shefki]

Originally Posted by PProvost As a CurseForge author ("migrated" from Ace), I've been wondering about how I might automate my publication from CF to wowi.

You could probably use svnsync to mirror your curseforge repo to WoWI. Looks like you'd still have to generate a release from the website since WoWI doesn't seem to generate releases just from tags. So not sure it'd really be worth it.

[dafire]

Originally Posted by Shefki You could probably use svnsync to mirror your curseforge repo to WoWI. Looks like you'd still have to generate a release from the website since WoWI doesn't seem to generate releases just from tags. So not sure it'd really be worth it.

svnsync needs an hook set on the target repository and i don't think you can do that here .)

the disadvantage on curse/curseforge/wowace is that that you can't use tags in curseforge/wowace if you want to keep beta versions to just a few users. If you tag, that version will go to the release site and you have to manually edit the files to alpha if you don't want that.