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.
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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.
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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.