WoWInterface and Curse working together to help protect authors and other site-users

[Cairenn]

Recently WoWInterface and Curse got together to come up with a solution for an ongoing problem. The problem in question is WowMatrix. The reasons they are a problem are many:

• WowMatrix violates author copyright and intellectual property rights:
  • They redistribute addons without authors' permissions;
  • When they first started they would scrape the legimate sites for addons then upload them to their own site in addition to deep-linking from the sites;
  • They edited authors' files to remove donation requests and links to their home sites, etc.; and
  • They have failed on many occasions to honour authors' requests to remove addons from their application;
• In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of date. This leads to authors having users complain about bugs, bugs that were fixed days or weeks ago in versions that are available on the legitimate sites, causing problems for both the authors and for the end-users;
• Until the community raised a hue and cry, Wowmatrix didn't even supply the authors' names as to who wrote the addon, let alone provide a link to where the addon was legitimately hosted;
• WowMatrix leeches from the legitimate hosting sites without permission, let alone compensation. Originally, they scraped our sites so they could upload addons to their own site without permission, in addition to deep-linking from our sites. They have finally stopped hosting the addons on their own site, but they still deep-link from our sites, using our resources to run their program. WowInterface and Curse use a lot of bandwidth every month which costs a lot of money. The way we pay our bills is through site ads, which are directly dependent on users viewing them, and premium memberships. WowMatrix bypasses our download pages, and, as a result, people are not viewing the ads. Of course, this means the ads aren't generating any revenue to pay for the bandwidth. At the rate they were going, if they were allowed to continue using our resources without any compensation, they were going to drive us right out of business. Not only are they stealing our bandwidth and preventing us from being able to recoup that loss, they also have their own ads all over their site and application. They are directly profiting from the stolen bandwidth; and
• Due to the massive resource drains they put on our sites, we have all experienced heightened loads and weaker performance, especially on patch days. During those days they download so much from our sites that sometimes we have a hard time keeping up to the demands; thus causing legitimate users to experience problems accessing our sites. That's just flat out unacceptable.

For months now, both sites and multiple authors have been trying to come up with solutions to the problems caused by WowMatrix. However, WowMatrix just keeps ignoring authors' requests to remove their addons from their application, working around the protections we have put in place, and proving repeatedly that they have no intention of ever becoming responsible, legitimate members of the community. Instead, they choose to continue to leech off the community. Well we, WoWInterface and Curse, have gotten together and between us we believe we may have found a solution to prevent them from pulling authors' addons from our sites to redistribute without permission and stealing our bandwidth any longer. Unfortunately we cannot release details on the solution, so as to keep it viable.

"Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah, get to the important question: What does this mean for me, your sites' user?" For the majority of users it should be completely transparent, you should not notice any difference whatsoever, other than improved site responsiveness during patch days. We hope that we will be able to revert the changes made to our sites eventually, if Wowmatrix ever stops violating authors' copyright and ceases stealing our bandwidth and other resources.

If you were previously using WowMatrix to keep your addons updated, please use our official updaters (WoWInterface, Curse). You may also mark addons as favorites on both WoWInterface and Curse in order to be alerted when they are updated.


Cairenn
Administrator, WoWInterface

Kaelten
Administrator, Curse & WowAce

[Note] If you are having any problems with being able to access files now, please post in this thread with details as to what OS you are running, what browser you are using, etc.

[Tristanian]

*applaud*

Let's hope that the measures in place, will bring some sense into these people and they will finally decide to claim a legitimate position in the community, so that such extreme actions are never again required.

[fewyn]

Awesome, been hoping for something like this to happen for a long time.

[Jesamyn]

For the sake of both sites and the authors, I'm genuinely glad to hear a solution has been found.

[Stormrage]

yay

[Kaelten]

I raise you a banana!

Originally Posted by Stormrage yay

[Ne0nguy]

Glad to hear this news, wowmatrix could have easily killed both these sites on patch day.
Just wish you could share a little more details about what you did to shut em down.

[Shirik]

Originally Posted by Ne0nguy Glad to hear this news, wowmatrix could have easily killed both these sites on patch day. Just wish you could share a little more details about what you did to shut em down.

I think after a while these details might be shared. But this is me trying to be Miss Cleo right now. We can only share these details once it's determined safe to do so.

[Yhor]

In before you evil sobs broke poor matrix.


/congratulate
Awesome news!

[Slakah]

Interesting timing, especially considering WoWInterface doesn't really have a competitive Updater.

[Shirik]

Originally Posted by Slakah WoWInterface doesn't really have a competitive Updater.

If you would like to pay me for this product, then by all means I will work harder. Until such time that I'm paid for it, though, I have other priorities, such as getting an internship and maintaining my grades in grad school.

I find it very interesting to see how quickly the world owes people something that is created for free.

[B0ZKURT]

I for one I'm glad, i just hope that it will permanently cripple, and hopefully stop wowmatrix from its leeching.


Also TY Shirik for pointing me to the right thread.

[Elloria]

This couldn't be better news. Ive had a rough day but this made it all better. Great job guys! Hopefully this will keep them at bay for a long time. Thank you for your hard work!

[Tekkub]

Originally Posted by Slakah Interesting timing, especially considering WoWInterface doesn't really have a competitive Updater.

Look a little closer at the timing tomorrow afternoon ^^

I for one am disappointed in this whole thing. One pathetic troll on the o.forums? Seriously people, stop agreeing with Cair/Kael. Things better get more interesting tomorrow when the clueless users go on their update binge.

[Cairenn]

Tekkub ....

[Tekkub]

I don't even know what your emoticons mean anymore...

[Cairenn]

Hehehe, that's me poking you, silly.

[Seerah]

Looks like you're trying to stab his eye out with a stick...

[Mossclaw]

<pours shot of Charbay Blood Orange Vodka>

<toasts> Bravo!

[xDarkside]

As a longtime wowmatrix user and advocate, I must say this really upsets me. I would happily have used either of the official site clients, if they weren't both complete **** compared to wowmatrix. It is (was?) simple, fast, intuitive and came with a minimal amount of advertisements. It was everything I wanted in an addon updater. I hope that now maybe you'll rework your clients in an attempt to make them more user friendly. If you'd done that in the first place, this problem likely would have never developed at all.