I was, until yesterday, unaware of any dispute regarding WowMatrix and Curse, and in fact completely unaware of the existence of this site itself. I'm frustrated and disappointed that WowMatrix no longer works, and not sure how to feel about the dispute, so I've been reading a number of sources trying to get the flavor of the argument. I still haven't made up my mind as to who's the greater evil here... but I think wowinterface just lost my (free) patronage forever (Curse has already lost me).

I had to close a popup advertisement to read the above post. When I did, the word virus had been underlined and turned green as an obvious hyperlink. I hovered over it to preview, and the link said, I swear to God:

Worth to see! Viruses at low prices. Compare online!

I don't believe in omens... but the irony is too much to bear.


Amen.

And keep your advertising minimally obtrusive. Please.

If you want to consider yourself a business, even if the goal is not to make profit, then you must consider your customer (end user) first. Have you no customer service experience? You don't win by complaining about what the competition is doing, you win by providing something better than them.

People use WowMatrix because it is far superior to what you offer, at least in the minds of the uncounted masses who aren't going to read these forums or post here, let alone give a damn about your lost bandwith.

Come on, guys. Do your secret nerd power handshake, pop some popcorn and watch Pirates of Silicon Valley, roll 3d8, or whatever it takes to pump yourselves up, go out there and BEAT the competition. Your smarmy celebration that it's someone else QQing about WowMatrix instead of you won't last long.

Look, I work in an industry that has yet to figure out what it's going to do about networks losing advertising revenue (or at least advertisers losing effectiveness) due to DVR use. I'm not saying you guys are wrong (though the better arguments seem to be coming from the one-posters, and "/click da button" arguments aren't convincing to anyone who would choose to use WowMatrix), but two wrongs don't make a right. Though they do make a profit, usually.

Three notes:
First, you will never convince anybody that hasn't already bought in to your point of view that your timing wasn't carefully chosen to cause maximum drama. You were perfectly within your rights... just don't act like it was any less juvenile than it was.
Second, I don't remember where I read it in the haze of staying up too late reading hundreds of posts to threads, but one of the developers tried to accuse WowMatrix of inflicting users with "unnecessary" updates??? Please, try harder.
Third, I've just updated one of my three "essential" addons with WowMatrix. Game on!

Bollocks... BOLLocks... bollOCKS... ya know what? I like it too... I think I'm gonna use it all the time now! Thanks again!

Please tell me this is sarcasm, cause I think I'm actually offended.

I have been trying to work it into my everyday conversations but I keep failing.

You'll have to remind me what current pays for their bandwidth, AD's?

Oh .. Adblock Plus ... script removal and flash block.

Hrmm .. there goes that theory.

I'd happily pay money towards wowmatrix, but wowinterface and its variants? .. no way, its been horrible to use since Everquest.

Provide good services you get buisness. Wowmatrix does just that.

Nice way to pidgeon hole yourselves tho.

I'd recommend "gah bollocks" when you stuff something up :)

I find the arguments against WM to be a wee bit two-faced.

On the one hand you say
"ZOMG they were stealing our content and hosting it themselves"
and then you say
"but we made them stop and now their stealing our bandwidth instead."

I'd written a mod or two in my day, and had them hosted on one or both sites. I don't recall giving over sole ownership of the programs, much less rights to make revenue off them, when I did so. Perhaps I should read your fine print more carefully in the future?

I'd much rather see a CPAN-ish model for these things... make a library of mods with a good index, and then mirror it to any and all that want to spare the bandwidth, so no single site is stuck paying the bill. But, I guess that's against the real issue here: your making a profit off the code of others.

I think he was serious. I want to know how he KNOWS about the secret nerd handshake in the first place!?! And 3d8? pffft... more like 4...

I have been trying to work it into my everyday conversations but I keep failing.[/quote]

I'm gonna use it here a lot, and practice vocally in front of my bathroom mirror. It's hard for us yanks to get the correct inflection... Bollocki, bollockum, bollockus... I came, I saw, I bollocksed...

Well, no, it's not obvious. The block is a secret shared by curse and WoWI, secret enough and effective enough that they expect the block to be permanent. What would they have lost by giving us some warning?

All they do is hide it. The ads still get tagged as viewed. Thanks but my theory stands.

You people would blame WoWI and Curse if they closed down due to WM leeching bandwidth.

You must be new to adblocking, it puts the sites as 127.0.0.1 in the host file so theres never a reference as to "user X pulled data from us via wowinterface" .. since it never looks up the data (which is seen as being at 127.0.0.1 [which is localhost, don't want to confuse you] is the location it "requests" the data from) .. it never registers the "viewing", thus not using bandwidth, registering the view or giving anyone money for useless ads no one ever clicks.... but hey .. nice try!

Theres the point.

WoWI does not use popups, only banner ads. If you received a popup, it was not from this site. Frankly it sounds to me like your machine is already infected with a virus and/or spyware.

I'm still questioning how much of a "work-with" WoWI supplied. The first post stated they asked WM to stop. As far as I know, it went no further than that. Asking somebody to stop is not working with: it's the exact opposite. It is asking nicely, but not "working with."

As for ad revenue. Anybody that understands the nature of the internet and business models, economics (I'm not expert, but I understand) knows that ad revenue is one of the worst business models around. Sure, you can get lucky with it and make some money off it, but as users find more and more ways to block ads or just ways to ignore them in general, it'll fall. Ad-revenue based business models are destined to fail. The only question is when.

So complaining about taking away ad-revenue is the same thing as saying "I'm not smart enough to think of a better business model, yet."

Just a re-quote to say that Ugark is right. This is how Ad-Block works. While it doesn't "modify the host file" it fools Firefox on the fly to think ads.domain.com is 127.0.0.1 and thus pull nothing.

So far as i recall the staff at WoWI did not claim WM was stealing their content. They dont own the addons hosted here. It was the authors who started the discussion and those that did not want their addons redistributed without permission went after WM and told them to stop hosting their work. Which it appears after a fashion they did.

The stance of the admins here has been stated clearly. People need to stop confusing the authors that choose to only host here with the admins of the site.

As for making a profit off others. Hosting a site takes money to cover costs. This is a fact. People should stop assuming that the need to cover costs is the same as making a profit.

Number 2 seems to come up often. Im not sure if people believe that or think its something that will rile other folks up.

No author is under contract or obligation to host here. The ones that do choose to do so for their own reasons which i will not guess at. People are hung up on it being about making a profit. Its simple. If the sites cant cover costs (and the increased bandwidth cause by WM) then they shut down. End of story. Full stop. All gone, BYE BYE! and the program ceases to work. Its basic logic. If your costs far exceed your gains long enough you are out of business. And anyone or anything trying to piggyback on it is SoL.

There's only a few ways you can block HTTP requests. The key is figuring out what requests belong to the WM client. Every route used to "identify WM traffic" can be spoofed. So in essence, the block is merely temporary. This is why starting such a war is a bad idea; you can't win. Internet packets are anonymous. The "source IP" is always the person's machine. You can't block WM traffic. Just like Hulu is unable to block Boxee. (for the exact same technical reasons, too)

WoWI was never able to get a response from WM. Curse was, and WM offered forth a tiny fraction of what their bandwidth was costing. It never went any father, so WoWI and Curse looked into other solutions. This is what they found.

The viability or not of an ad-based model is rather moot now, thanks to Blizzard's new addon policy. Addons must be free to download, so that basically leaves ad-based, donation based, and premium services beyond the free downloads. If WoWI only gave their updater to paying users do you think that could cover the rest of the bandwidth bill? I doubt it personally. Ad-based plus premium may work, and we'll see where that goes with Curse's updater.

The other thing you're neglecting though is that WoWI (and EQI) were able to sustain themselves on an ad-based model for a long time before WM came along.

Here you go:
In other words, WoWMatrix would not even speak to WoWI.

As for your tripe about ad revenue being a bad business model, it seems to work ok for Google.

There was roughly a 24hour warning. I read the article the day before the patch went live. The fact that some folks didnt see it is not unexpected in my eyes. Even if they gave a week i would guess that the number of angry posts would be the same or in all probability much higher. Some folks would have been appeased though i would imagine the number of those people would have been quite small judging by the number of people that have said a warning would be nice.

Did you know it has been dropping? It's why Google is going other routes, now. Online Office packages, business searches (we just bought a Google search packages to index a site for a client so we can use Google Search but through an API keeping our site intact).

I know EQI and WoWI has done it for a while now. I was quite acting during EQInterface's initial startup days. I even wrote tutorials (which are far outdated and no longer wrking) for EQ's interface.

WM was playing hard ball against Curse. That, I don't blame. Curse is backed by IGE. They are hardly hurting for funds. If anything, I bet Curse is jealous people are using WM over the Curse client. And a bit "upset" WM is getting ad-revenue when they weren't getting it through the Curse Client. The way these laywers work today, I can see that.