[kalidav]

As a fellow web developer I sympathise with sites such as Wowinterface and Curse – the bandwidth required must be simply enormous, and having millions of people pinging your site for addon updates is a huge strain on servers. Having said that I think the change to block WM is overall detrimental to users; and I for one am going to have to go back to updating addons manually.

I think ultimately what everything comes down two is – bandwidth requirements and advertising. Perhaps a better solution would be to have a remote API similar to Facebook. Bandwidth problems could be solved through this as both the operations could be optimised, and results returned compressed (as opposed to scraping every, single addon page required). Then, you can distribute private keys to access said API to applications provided that they display your ads (somehow) to the users. If the ads are removed from the app, then the site (you) can disable the key and block the program’s access to the addon API.

Whether you agree or not, the WoWinterface and Curse updaters aren’t convenient in their current forms (and the curse one is just downright bloat ware). If you created this API, you could use it not only in your own applications but give developers the freedom to work with you, rather than against you to create fast, simple applcations that do exactly what users want (to update their addons) and nothing more.

And that's my 2c.