Originally Posted by Pyrophoric
Heh... I understood the sarcasm. I did not understand what specifically what they were implying though.
Forums and feedback are most beneficial to users, not authors, unless the addon wasnt free.
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Forums and feedback are useful authors as well. While an author can spend a lot of time debugging, users will still find bugs. Its just the nature of programming. For many small AddOns, a single forum thread takes care of their feedback needs. Other larger AddOns may have entire forum sections devoted to just them (look at oUF on this site for a good example).
Showcasing is just more time the author has to spend explaining what their addon does and why it does it. While some may enjoy this process, many do not seem to care either way.
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Those authors who do a poor job of "selling" their AddOn to a potential user usually finds that the author does not get many downloads. An good author will take the time to show a potential user why his/her AddOn would be a good addition to the user's UI. Such a write up will include screenshots and in some cases even videos. Personally I want to see what an AddOn does before I hit the download button.
Version control system? I wouldn't see this as being much of a problem but I will take your word for it.
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You are not an author so you would not see the benefits of a version control system such as SVN, Git or Mecurial. Then again an average user will never see the inside of a development repository nor should they. However I am a power user, tester, and AddOn author. I know the benefits of using a version control system. I have even have a Git set up on my machine to keep track of my local changes to my AddOns.
User interaction is seems to be at the bottom of authors list. In fact, many authors have stopped making plugins simply because people left negative or hurtful feedback. Most recently, the author of Outfitter WAS going to stop releasing public updates for this exact reason.
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The author of Outfitter was going to stop public releases of his mods in protest over the new UI Development policy that Blizzard unleashed a few weeks ago. This had NOTHING to do with user interaction.
Most AddOn authors welcome user interaction as those users (in particular power users) will submit ideas and bug reports. Other users will contribute artwork, textures and even additional modules for the AddOn. Users who speak languages other than the author's will do localization (aka translation) for an author as well. Trust me, this is a big deal with WoW being a multi language game.
Reasons to use WoWMatrix ... it's lite, simple and quick. The author information is displayed and they added a donation popup so you can easily contribute directly to the author.
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The only reason why author info and the donation pop-ups where added was to try to regain some "legitimacy" from Authors. However this is a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. The changes where made to WoWMatrix after Authors hammered on WM for years (literally). WoWMatrix first popped up on our radar back in October of 2007.
Really, I don't support anything here other than an easy-to-use updater. The fact that I believe WoWMatrix is mostly because of the information I have seen. I haven't seen information that has definitively proven one side or another. Until a time when that can be done, I will support whatever updater saves me time and enables me to just hop on and play the way I want for an hour or less. The minutes I save having to update 30-40 mods is better spent going to the spending time with my loved ones or going to the gym.
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No one has EVER said that WoWMatrix's updater was crappy. In fact all have said it is an excellent tool. However the business practices of WoWMatrix is what has drawn the wrath of Authors, Curse and WoWInterface. Curse and WoWI have tried to work with WM, however WM has constantly rebuffed them (contrary to WM's "FAQ"). Authors have found it to be extremely difficult to get their AddOns removed from the updater. In some case Authors have had to resort to using DMCA takedown notices to get their Addons removed.
Now I run quite a few AddOns myself. Do you know how many I have to update at a time? 3 to 4 a week IF there are major code changes. The vast majority of changes are small things that do not effect the AddOn. These changes are things like version control tag changes, or localization updates (aka a button that says No in English got translated to "nien" in German). Do you really need these changes? No. So why update 35 to 40 AddOn daily or even weekly? I do all my updates manually. This is on top of being a father, moderating several forums, serving as a Guild officer, keeping my house clean, cooking, getting out for my hour's daily walk, getting my kid to and a from school plus helping with homework and a myriad of other daily RL tasks.