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

[Tekkub]

I don't think anyone here will argue that WM is (was?) not a well designed little program. The mistakes they made were in how they went about getting the content their program delivered.

They got the delivery method down solid, but ****ed up on the content source.
WoWI/Curse have the content, but haven't yet nailed the "better" delivery method.

It's kinda hard to fault the sites for not providing an update service when that wasn't their design intention in the first place. Hell, you could say all of this stemmed from ace, which got the delivery down great (maybe because it was a developer community in the first place) but failed on the bandwidth issue (and, well, WM follow in those footsteps). WoWI and Curse want to get the updater AND the bandwidth issues right, which is why it's taking time.

[Zyonin]

/congratulate

About time too.

To the WM user:

I really can't believe you are trying to defend WM (I am not going to bother with the name). You are setting yourself up for a good old fashioned flaming. I have used both WoWInterface Updater and the Curse Client (I was a tester for CC). I personally have never had issues with the recent versions of the Curse Client. Its an excellent updater. WIU is OK, it never had any adverts and it did what was advertised on the tin. Sure, it had its issues, but I found the WIU to be easy to use. Same thing with CC (especially Kaelten's overhaul of CC). Both the official updaters are fast, both don't have adverts (currently), CC is user friendly (WoWIU has some current minor issues but is usable). Neither official updater leeches bandwidth from other sites.

Besides its not difficult to manually update your AddOns. No one needs to update ALL of their AddOns everyday. By using WM your are basically giving "The Finger" to Curse, WoWInterface, WoWUI.Incgamers plus every Author who upload their mods to those sites. In my opinion you (and WM) do not display any shred of respect for any AddOn's authors nor the site they choose to upload to.

[killdrath]

As a clueless person who was not aware of the issues caused by WM, and thus used it regularly, how do I go about fixing this? I downloaded the WoWIUI but it looks to be a lot of work to get it set up (having to track down the UID for everything). Is there anything I could do to make this easier? Especially since it seems to id all the sub-components of the various mods (i.e. the dozen or so folders for x-perl) as seperate mods.

And is the WoWIUI page accurate that it is actually an EoL product? Would I be better off getting the curse client? All I know is that I have already informed my family to remove WM from all our systems, now that I know the truth.

[Zyonin]

Originally Posted by killdrath As a clueless person who was not aware of the issues caused by WM, and thus used it regularly, how do I go about fixing this? I downloaded the WoWIUI but it looks to be a lot of work to get it set up (having to track down the UID for everything). Is there anything I could do to make this easier? Especially since it seems to id all the sub-components of the various mods (i.e. the dozen or so folders for x-perl) as seperate mods. And is the WoWIUI page accurate that it is actually an EoL product? Would I be better off getting the curse client? All I know is that I have already informed my family to remove WM from all our systems, now that I know the truth.

What I did when I was using WIU (I currently do all my updating manually) was to make use of the Favorite feature that WoWI has. Simple tag the mods you use as a Favorite (its just a quick click of a button). WIU will then retrieve your Favorites list making it real easy to keep tabs on the mods you use. Even though I manually update, I still find the Favorites feature on this site to be quite handy to keep track of the mods I use.

[xabbott]

Most people just want WAU again. The growing amount of addons people run make manual updating a very time consuming process. WoW Matrix became popular (by word of mouth) because it was the most simple and effective updater after WAU was shut down. Especially when compared to the initial version of the Curse updater. The situation wouldn't have occurred if a user demand for it didn't exists.

Now the Curse updater is much better (3.0), the site has a huge following since the early days of WoW. Instead of being able to pull users away with a superior product and a pretty solid history in the community. They have to work on something that Wow Matrix will be able to bypass eventually.

If there is a relationship between WoWI and Curse, why two updaters?

I completely understand why people in charge of UI sites dislike WM. But I do think attacking this one product instead of the problem is much like the RIAA shutting down Napster.

There will be other update clients, some already allow users to define download sources.

[xabbott]

Originally Posted by killdrath Would I be better off getting the curse client?

In a word, yes. It's a much more mature project.

If you need to use WoWI for those few addons from authors who would rather not post to Curse you could setup WoWI's updater for just those. Although there aren't very many exclusive addons, so you could manually update them as well.

With WM being recommended by even the most casual of WoW players, sites, and podcast. I expect your situation will be very common tomorrow.

[Tristanian]

Originally Posted by Tekkub It's kinda hard to fault the sites for not providing an update service when that wasn't their design intention in the first place. Hell, you could say all of this stemmed from ace, which got the delivery down great (maybe because it was a developer community in the first place) but failed on the bandwidth issue (and, well, WM follow in those footsteps). WoWI and Curse want to get the updater AND the bandwidth issues right, which is why it's taking time.

Pretty much, this. The issue of WoWMatrix has been thoroughly discussed (to death) in the past. It really all comes down to the fact that WAU set a very dangerous precedent by providing fast, easy and in the vast majority of cases needless updates. People got used to it, forsake the websites, they became demanding and condescending when devs accidentally (or even intentionally) broke something (remember it was alpha quality addons) and all in all, as a wise man once said, "it's just an old usecase that people refuse to give up." WoWI and Curse are just doing what they should have done from the beginning and while it may be "evil" to do so, on a patch day, it was no real secret that this coming for a long time now. Can't really understand why some people act so surprised.

[Rendus]

People act surprised because, unless you're one of the people who bother with the forums here, you'd never know what's going on or why. There's no link I can find on the WOW Interface site explaining the issues people have with WowMatrix. There's nothing there if you're a normal user of the site.

WowMatrix will easily work around this, I'm sure - A change of a useragent string, throttling update polling, something like that, and we'll be back at square one, with users who just want to update their addons caught in the lurch, between the horrible interfaces of these sites or their clients, and the desire of these sites to cut off WowMatrix.

Of course, WowMatrix and it's ilk wouldn't be necessary at all if addon authors actually wrote addons that worked properly, instead of slinging blobs of broken code around.

-edit- One more thing. You must be truly proud of yourselves to go out of your way to inconvenience people on patch day. It's an interesting logic, there. I understand the part about wanting to reduce server load, and I'm sure there's an unspoken desire to push people to the site for all the various reasons you want hits. But at the same time, you offer a public service - It's interesting to me that you'd be so quick to inconvenience users of this service to spite WowMatrix authors.

This will just drive me to mirror addons on my guild's site, avoiding both the grief of trying to get everyone updated addons and having to deal with Curse or WoWInterface. Instead of being able to play tomorrow, I'll have to herd cats all day. I'm not alone in this regard - Surely, I'll be violating somebody's copyright by doing this, but I'm not about to wrestle with it.

[FrankN]

Originally Posted by Rendus -edit- One more thing. You must be truly proud of yourselves to go out of your way to inconvenience people on patch day. It's an interesting logic, there. I understand the part about wanting to reduce server load, and I'm sure there's an unspoken desire to push people to the site for all the various reasons you want hits. But at the same time, you offer a public service - It's interesting to me that you'd be so quick to inconvenience users of this service to spite WowMatrix authors. This will just drive me to mirror addons on my guild's site, avoiding both the grief of trying to get everyone updated addons and having to deal with Curse or WoWInterface. Instead of being able to play tomorrow, I'll have to herd cats all day. I'm not alone in this regard - Surely, I'll be violating somebody's copyright by doing this, but I'm not about to wrestle with it.

I see some nice DMCA requests in the mailbox of your guild portals admin.

[Visceroid]

Let me guess, but the change to affect WM will also affect other free updaters like WUU, right?

[Rendus]

Originally Posted by FrankN I see some nice DMCA requests in the mailbox of your guild portals admin.

Guild portals. Funny stuff.

File attachments in a phpBB restricted access subforum I setup for the sole purpose of this. I may even just pull addons to the server in a standard HTTP auth protected directory.

It's either this, or send each of a hundred guildmates here searching for updates to, say, FuBar. Have you tried searching for just the base FuBar addon here lately?

Modules that haven't been updated since 2006 show up in the default search.

[Slakah]

This will just drive me to mirror addons on my guild's site, avoiding both the grief of trying to get everyone updated addons and having to deal with Curse or WoWInterface. Instead of being able to play tomorrow, I'll have to herd cats all day. I'm not alone in this regard - Surely, I'll be violating somebody's copyright by doing this, but I'm not about to wrestle with it.

Wow, just wow. I think this is one of the worst cases of user entitlement I've seen in a long time.

Originally Posted by Shirik 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.

When did I suggest the world owes me something (I didn't even use an updater when I played WoW)? I'm just interested why WoWI would push ahead with this, when currently from what I've heard they're not in the best position to fully capitalise from it. I presume it was to avoid the incoming storm?

But anyway I'll get back to the heralding of the death of WoWMatrix.

Need moar QQ threads.

[Rendus]

Originally Posted by Slakah Wow, just wow. I think this is one of the worst cases of user entitlement I've seen in a long time.

Here's the thing. These websites, curse and WoWInterface, are pretty close to openly hostile when you're looking for something. Search for an addon, and it'll gleefully let you download an obsolete addon. It'll happily let you grab addons that haven't worked in 3 years. It will, without hesitation, mix addons that do and do not work. A casual user won't know that while the website DOES have timestamps for updates, and DOES have an outdated category, it does not filter these out by default.

Very few addons, to my knowledge, refuse the right to redistribute the work the authors presumably want as many people as possible to use. It's a handful of individuals that get uppity about redistribution for whatever reason. I don't understand it, but it's left to us to work around.

It's amazing to me that through all this (I've been lurking in the threads on occasion), the authors of the addons that are up in arms about WowMatrix only have their interests in mind. They don't care about the end users of their 'products'. They just want to restrict where people download their addons from. Entirely their right, as misguided as such a desire is, but as a user (either directly, or peripherally through a guildmate's use of that addon improving their performance), it's something I'm left to try to work around.

I can either send each person using any given addon to WOWInterface, search, hope it turns up a useful result, download, get whatever the latest published version is, hope it works, hope they know how to manually install addons, hope it's backwards compatible with existing saved variables... Or I can do the legwork once, point people to a known working copy, and be done with it.

-edit- *snerk* Speaking of... 4 addons out of 22 updated in the last 3 months? The second one I look at is 'beta quality' with 5 comments, two of which are unresponded to errors. The very thing I dread when helping guildmates get addons installed regardless of the source.

[Tristanian]

Originally Posted by Slakah Wow, just wow. I think this is one of the worst cases of user entitlement I've seen in a long time.

Guess you haven't been to the UI and macros forum recently

As for Rendus, it is well within the rights of both WoWI and Curse to protect their investment, moreso since they provide the source of the files. WM is just a smart distribution mechanism (and you can debate that it isn't by mentioning technicalities such as "hotlinking" etc for 100 more pages, for 100 years, it won't alter the outcome), that offers nothing to those that are providing the source, which is ultimately addon authors. You see the real difference is, for sites such as WoWI and Curse protecting and supporting the providers of the source (aka authors) > user convenience (despite the fact that they also gain from it but why wouldn't they, at least they provide a valid service) and quite frankly this is an important reason on why many of us, continue to post our work here.

[Dyspeptic]

Ok to all you people *****ing about your preccious WM getting broken on patch day.
I have used WM for quite some time (in ignorance of the harm it causes WoWI and Curse) after reading the (legitimate imo) concerns towards the way WM pulls addons and even alters them I swapped my updaters to Curse client and WoWiUD, within 10mins every addon I use (around 100+) were covered and updated with minimal effort on my part.
There really is no issue here except the one of your own damn laziness to switch to an UD client that is friendly to these sites which provide you with much more than the raw addons.
In the time it has taken most of you to post here whining about your preciuos WM you could have DL'd and installed CC and WoWiUD and saved yourself the inevitable flaming you will surely recieve.

[Takika]

As I can see the new version image breaks other addon updaters (which uses html parse like Waddu) too. Is there any xml interface to get addon informations (update time, version, description, author infos) without getting the full info page?

[Rendus]

Originally Posted by Tristanian Guess you haven't been to the UI and macros forum recently As for Rendus, it is well within the rights of both WoWI and Curse to protect their investment, moreso since they provide the source of the files. WM is just a smart distribution mechanism (and you can debate that it isn't by mentioning technicalities such as "hotlinking" etc for 100 more pages, for 100 years, it won't alter the outcome), that offers nothing to those that are providing the source, which is ultimately addon authors. You see the real difference is, for sites such as WoWI and Curse protecting and supporting the providers of the source (aka authors) > user convenience (despite the fact that they also gain from it but why wouldn't they, at least they provide a valid service) and quite frankly this is an important reason on why many of us, continue to post our work here.

And therein lies the problem. The authors of addons feel that the ability of the user to actually find and use their addon should be inhibited for whatever reason - I'm not sure if it's vanity, if it's some misplaced desire to control every aspect of their project, if it's just open hostility toward the people they wrote the addon for.

I have never, and will never, argue that WowMatrix's method was the correct one - I'm, believe it or not, on the side of the site maintainers in that regard, as the owner of a moderately popular site of some variety myself. Hotlinking denies them the ad revenue they'd receive from visits.

My point is solely this: I cannot understand why the addon authors, who have no stake in WoWInterface or Curse, are so vehemently against alternate means of getting their addons. This change did, as far as I can tell, break other addon updaters that did not have the issues people speak of with WowMatrix such as editing of addons and unauthorized rehosting (which is it - Do you want them to host the addons themselves, or not? You get arguments from both sides of that fence). There's likely no technical solution that would single out WowMatrix that wouldn't make it trivial to work around, but baby with the bathwater and all that.

The 'I'm going to rehost for my guild' comment was as much truth as bait of sorts to draw out the very sort of comment it did - DMCA takedowns for redistributing an unmodified copy of a work that is freely available, and almost certainly doesn't have licensing information made available on a page I can access without actually downloading the addon. This rehosting provides no further burden to WOWI/Curse, provides fantastic convenience to the users of these addons in that they will have a one-stop shop for addon updates that have been verified to work by their guildmaster and without having to deal with the oddities of the 3.1 Survival Guides and such that will crop up all over the place, with many of them being of dubious accuracy.

But, authors > users.

Originally Posted by Dyspeptic Ok to all you people *****ing about your preccious WM getting broken on patch day. I have used WM for quite some time (in ignorance of the harm it causes WoWI and Curse) after reading the (legitimate imo) concerns towards the way WM pulls addons and even alters them I swapped my updaters to Curse client and WoWiUD, within 10mins every addon I use (around 100+) were covered and updated with minimal effort on my part. There really is no issue here except the one of your own damn laziness to switch to an UD client that is friendly to these sites which provide you with much more than the raw addons. In the time it has taken most of you to post here whining about your preciuos WM you could have DL'd and installed CC and WoWiUD and saved yourself the inevitable flaming you will surely recieve.

Myself, I have my addons updated. It's the other hundred or so people that'll be looking to me for help that I'm not looking forward to, and no amount of sloth on my part is responsible for it.

Want to walk your average WOW users through this? At a casual glance, I can't even find the WoWInterface installer. Find? Nothing. Community? This. Addons? Well, those are addons. Projects? Nope, a SVN repository of addons in various questionable stages of quality. Forums? This heap again.

I google for "wowinterface addon updater", and first hit has this gem:

Please Note: This updater is being discontinued. We're allowing you to continue downloading this current version until the new one is ready, but please be aware that it may not work as well as could be hoped for.

Well... That's... Good. So do I download that or not?

I know I wouldn't. And given the Downloads: 74,943 figure, I suspect many others aren't convinced either.

[StolenLegacy]

Originally Posted by Rendus And therein lies the problem. The authors of addons feel that the ability of the user to actually find and use their addon should be inhibited for whatever reason - I'm not sure if it's vanity, if it's some misplaced desire to control every aspect of their project, if it's just open hostility toward the people they wrote the addon for. I have never, and will never, argue that WowMatrix's method was the correct one - I'm, believe it or not, on the side of the site maintainers in that regard, as the owner of a moderately popular site of some variety myself. Hotlinking denies them the ad revenue they'd receive from visits. My point is solely this: I cannot understand why the addon authors, who have no stake in WoWInterface or Curse, are so vehemently against alternate means of getting their addons. This change did, as far as I can tell, break other addon updaters that did not have the issues people speak of with WowMatrix such as editing of addons and unauthorized rehosting (which is it - Do you want them to host the addons themselves, or not? You get arguments from both sides of that fence). There's likely no technical solution that would single out WowMatrix that wouldn't make it trivial to work around, but baby with the bathwater and all that. The 'I'm going to rehost for my guild' comment was as much truth as bait of sorts to draw out the very sort of comment it did - DMCA takedowns for redistributing an unmodified copy of a work that is freely available, and almost certainly doesn't have licensing information made available on a page I can access without actually downloading the addon. This rehosting provides no further burden to WOWI/Curse, provides fantastic convenience to the users of these addons in that they will have a one-stop shop for addon updates that have been verified to work by their guildmaster and without having to deal with the oddities of the 3.1 Survival Guides and such that will crop up all over the place, with many of them being of dubious accuracy. But, authors > users.

You don't get the point.
Curse and WoWI use tons of bandwith to provide addon updates to their users. They need to pay for that bandwith somehow, and they do so by displaying ads on the download pages of addons. What Wowmatrix does is circumvent these download pages by "hotlinking", e.g. linking directly to the files inside the curse/wowi servers. Now, you might ask, why are the sites' own updaters, most notably the curse client, different? Because the sites can put ads in there, too, thus can use that income to pay for the bandwith they use. If you support WoWmatrix, you support making Curse/WoWI bankrupt, and that would also mean no more addons quickly available to you.

regards,
stolenlegacy, addon author.

Originally Posted by Rendus Myself, I have my addons updated. It's the other hundred or so people that'll be looking to me for help that I'm not looking forward to, and no amount of sloth on my part is responsible for it. Want to walk your average WOW users through this? At a casual glance, I can't even find the WoWInterface installer. Find? Nothing. Community? This. Addons? Well, those are addons. Projects? Nope, a SVN repository of addons in various questionable stages of quality. Forums? This heap again. I google for "wowinterface addon updater", and first hit has this gem: Please Note: This updater is being discontinued. We're allowing you to continue downloading this current version until the new one is ready, but please be aware that it may not work as well as could be hoped for. Well... That's... Good. So do I download that or not? I know I wouldn't. And given the Downloads: 74,943 figure, I suspect many others aren't convinced either.

It has been stated multiple times in this thread, download the curse client until the new WoWI updater is ready, most addons avialable here are also avialable for download at curse, thus being updatable via the curse client.

[Rendus]

Originally Posted by StolenLegacy You don't get the point. Curse and WoWI use tons of bandwith to provide addon updates to their users. They need to pay for that bandwith somehow, and they do so by displaying ads on the download pages of addons. What Wowmatrix does is circumvent these download pages by "hotlinking", e.g. linking directly to the files inside the curse/wowi servers. Now, you might ask, why are the sites' own updaters, most notably the curse client, different? Because the sites can put ads in there, too, thus can use that income to pay for the bandwith they use. If you support WoWmatrix, you support making Curse/WoWI bankrupt, and that would also mean no more addons quickly available to you. regards, stolenlegacy, addon author.

I believe I get the point quite clearly, as demonstrated in the very block of text you quoted. For your convenience:

I have never, and will never, argue that WowMatrix's method was the correct one - I'm, believe it or not, on the side of the site maintainers in that regard, as the owner of a moderately popular site of some variety myself. Hotlinking denies them the ad revenue they'd receive from visits. My point is solely this: I cannot understand why the addon authors, who have no stake in WoWInterface or Curse, are so vehemently against alternate means of getting their addons.

If the only argument addon authors made was the concern about WoWI/Curse, sure, I'd be onboard. The argument brought up more often than not from what I've seen, though, is the mod author's rights.

I think some of this is anger/fallout about the changes to the Blizzard UI policy regarding donations (another common complaint - They can't see my donation buttons!), directed at a target they can actually do something to.

[FrankN]

Originally Posted by Rendus My point is solely this: I cannot understand why the addon authors, who have no stake in WoWInterface or Curse, are so vehemently against alternate means of getting their addons. ... Myself, I have my addons updated. It's the other hundred or so people that'll be looking to me for help that I'm not looking forward to, and no amount of sloth on my part is responsible for it.

The other hundred are to lazy to search for updates for their addons, they will be to lazy to search for the right place to get support or to submit a bug report.
Why should authors have a look on several alternate download pages for support questions, bug reports, and so on?