Updating someone else's addon?

gwyd · 08-27-12, 05:20 PM

Hey guys. I've been using oUF_hank for a couple of years now and it's great. Hank no longer plays and I haven't found anyway to get in touch with him. What is the general etiquette for updating other people's addons? I've got it pretty much completely functional for 5.0, but I'm really not sure the best/right way to make it available to others.

Thanks!

Xrystal · 08-27-12, 05:27 PM

People do fan updates stating clearly that it's an interim patch until the original author comes back.

myrroddin · 08-27-12, 06:26 PM

WowInterface has slightly different rules than Curse, and I'm not sure what they are. Over on Curse, they have a policy Wiki http://wow.curseforge.com/wiki/knowl...tive-projects/

oUF_Hank's project page on Curseforge: http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/ouf_hank/

If you want to take over the project, and have followed Curse's procedure, the report button is the very tiny ! inside a red triangle at the bottom right of the page. Follow the prompts to bring the project to a moderator's attention.

Phanx · 08-27-12, 06:35 PM

According to the oUF Hank page on CurseForge, the layout is licensed under the LGPL, which means you are free to modify it and distribute your modified versions.

If you have truly tried every option for contacting him (including PMing him on CurseForge and/or Curse) and have not gotten any response after a few weeks, then I'd suggest contacting the admins/mods here and on CurseForge to request access to the addon's pages so you can post updates.

However, before publishing anything, you should think about whether you really want to take on the responsibility of keeping the addon updated. If you're just going to "fire and forget" -- post an update and then never answer questions, address bug reports, or post any future updates -- then please don't bother.

gwyd · 08-28-12, 06:37 AM

Thanks for the feedback guys. As it stands, I really can't commit the time to maintaining all of oUF_hank. I'll probably post a fan update and keep maintaining it for a subset of classes (as many as I can get to).

Phanx · 08-28-12, 10:24 PM

If you don't have time to maintain the whole addon properly, please just don't publish your partial update. The addon sites already have too many half-assed "fan updates".

_Hankthetank · 08-30-12, 12:21 PM

You didn't make a move to contact me but that could be due to the fact that I've been exiled by some really diligent moderator (if one of them reads this I wouldn't complain about a reactivation of the account). As people suggested just make a fork of the project. If you are really stuck and patient pm me but don't expect too much. I hardly ever drop in here anymore and have a hard time making sense of my own lua projects... use it lose it. I also have my old Photoshop files for my addons somewhere on my backup drive.