Protocol for taking over abandoned addons
 

I have been patching two addons Ara_Broker_Reputations and Ara_Broker_XP since they were abandoned in 2013. I have tried to reach out to Aranath who is the original author about formally taking over these two, rather than just submitting them as patches. I have had no response, so I assume that they have abandoned them.

The main reason for assuming full control is so that I don't have to label my changes as patches, and so that I can also post them to Curse and other sites. I don't want to rename them, and want him to retain full credit of original authorship.

Taking over someone's work like this is new to me. What is the protocol here? I obviously don't have access on WoW Interface to update the original postings for these addons, but would like to potentially update them there if that is possible.

What is the license on them?

No license is specified that I can tell.

Original links are here:
http://wowinterface.com/downloads/in...putations.html
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...aBrokerXP.html

Thanks

If there is no license then it automatically defaults to All Rights Reserved. That means that we can't actually transfer ownership of the addon to you. Until we hear from Aranath you will have to keep submitting your fixes as patches. Sorry. =/

Drat, figured.

I've sent him PMs, but he's obviously not seeing them. Is there a way to send to his email? His profile says sending to him via email has been blocked through his profile. Is this something an admin can do on my behalf? The message seems to indicate that may be possible:

Authors do that generally due to getting too many emails from their addons on all of the sites they've submitted them to. It can get out of hand if you have even just a few popular addons. To have an admin manually change their settings (which they can) is an invasion of privacy. The last activity on this site for him was over a year ago which it would be safe to assume is due to quitting the game for whatever reasoning.

Many people what they do to continue an addon is they'll re-release the addon with something along the lines of fan update in the title or something. (ie: Ara Broker XP (Fan Update))