The ZAM Network is owned by Affinity Media who are indirect owners of IGE (yes the gold sellers).

Pretty much every massively popular fansite has sold out to a web advertising network eventually. Gold selling and gold selling advertising is big business.

However Curse raised 800k from venture capital investors in 2006 and a further 5 mill (yes multiple millions) in 2007 from French private equity investors so it seems unlikely they will be getting taken over by the gold sellers.

They will need to be turning a profit in advertising revenue or subscriptions sooner or later.

Wrong. You shouldn't spread such inflammatory rumors without substantive evidence to backup your assertion. Here's a link to the head administrator of WoWInterface saying that their parent company and IGE are not related: Allakhazam... - WoWInterface

I can't find it now, but there was a 20+ page thread on the official forums which debunked the myth, corroborated by legal professionals who actually knew how to read the documents which lead to initial confusion.

Hey guys, just wanted to say hi.

In regards to Curse:
Not only are we doing a new client. But we're doing a new Curse.com too.

I, more than any of you HATE the current state of curse.com. Why? Because I HAVE TO FIX IT!

I'm excited to say that come the new curse.com that much of its going to be better. Everything is getting redesigned form the ground up. Being intimately involved with the states of things, past and future, I promise you guys that things will be better.

As far as WowAce's changes. I'm excited. Mainly because for the first time I'm going to be able to work on WowAce fulltime. It's been suffering from slow bit rot as its been on autopilot for so long.

I know there are ups and downs. But I just ask that for now that people would tell us whats wrong so we can make it the best possible, and then wait until they see the results before they completely go crazy. Thanks to you guys who do have this attitude.

I'm also fully willing to talk and discuss with anyone who's interested.

Later guys,
Kael

Kaelten,

While I fully understand the necessity for a paid version in order to keep WowAce running, which features does the premium version add? The ability to update every few hours, or the ability to update all addons at once (without clicking a checkbox beside each addon). In other words, is the free version just missing a few features, or is it completely crippled?

Just giving similar input to what I've already seen, and as an end user I'll use it, or I wont. I already use WoWI far more the curse in order to find non-ACE AddOns that are actually up to date and are easier to find.

As both an end user, and a GM of a medium progression guild have issues with Addons.

ACE and the WAU allowed stupid easy up to the minute updated mods that I could ensure that the raid was all on the correct version, however I have so many things in my Addon folder that I really have no clue what half of these damn libraries are for, and why I have so many addons. I'm sure that I've been updating libraries that I don't use, wasting everyone's bandwidth.

Curse is okay, but searching it is a BITCH, I search for 1 mod and I get 5 different version being updated by 3 people and 2 that are 3 years out of date as well as 15 different "compilation" packages that all contain that addon.

We have ~90 people in the guild, a good portion of them are HORRIBLE at updating them, I've had to host the correct version to ensure that we all were running the same version more then 1 time(Omen/Threat).

I agree completely that it's frustrating to search for AddOns right now on Curse. Almost to the point of stupidity, to be completely honest.

This is a major reason we've taken a hard stance on new projects and files being uploaded (all projects/files are created/uploaded via CurseForge now), and each must be approved before you can have it hosted on Curse.com. This should help substantially in clearing up the clutter on the site.

We also have something coming for compilations that we're not quite ready to talk about (still working out the basics of how it will work), that should allow them to co-exist with AddOns, without actually getting in the way of search results.

In regards to #1: Do you have a link to legitimate proof that Curse.com has been compromised with trojans (I'm guessing you're suggesting ads with trojans embedded -- which is incorrect if so)?

#2: There are potential security reasons (on our end) as to why the client is closed source. That's pretty much the only reason it is.

#3: The billing system for premium should be flexible enough that you won't have to disclose credit card info. We'll have more details on premium as we get closer to actually launching it, but suffice to say no one will be losing any usability on the current Curse.com by us introducing premium. We're designing entirely new features to coincide with premium.

1: It is funny that someone would use "searching is painful" as reason to bash curse.com. Only the retards wouldn't be able to recognize whether the addon he searched from curse and was just about to download is the right one or not.

2: People, please realize one thing, Bandwidth is not free! wowace will not sustain itself, from the reason people have explained in previous posts, and curse or any future addon sites will not be able to sustain itself if it doesn't have a profitable business plan.

3: It is, at best, aggravating to receive accusations such as having trojans in the software you work hard on, not to mention a baseless one. The quality of software doesn't depend on being open sourced or not, but it depends on the communications between the developers and the community that use it. Even if the new curse client is "open sourced", I don't think most of us would bother to build a "trojan-less" one ourselves.

Oh and remember there were words about the webpage used in WAU has a keylogger? I didn't follow it, but that proves open sourced software is not taken for granted as safe.

The problem with that was the advertising network was serving the malware, not WAU. When the wowace guys got notice from it, they DISABLED the advertisement display on WAU (aka blanked the page that WAU was refering to to serve the ads).

Sorry I should have said Affinity Media was the parent company of IGE. They claim to have sold any stakes in IGE and no longer be involved since back in June last year.

Call me cynical if you like but I suspect there is still some involvement. Who knows... if the wind changed, the ownership of some of these companies could change at the drop of a hat (like they seem too have in the past).

Anyway the point was....

a) Curse Inc is not owned by Affinity Media unlike many other popular sites or by IGE or anything like that.
b) Curse Inc will be under shareholder pressure (at some stage) to perform and generate ROI for their investors.

Well I'm glad someone at Curse agrees that it needs to be improved. Hearing that it's going to be re-designed from the ground up sounds nice, I look forward to giving it another go when it's done.

One thing that a few others have mentioned in this thread but I would like to repeat for clarity:

Have the features for the free and the premium Curse clients been established? Or is that still in the works? I imagine it would be hard to balance the different versions. The free needs to be able to... work, in order for it to even be worth using. But if it "works", what makes the premium version better? I would assume you would need to do things like limit the amount of mod updates per hour? Because "ticking all the checkboxes" compared to "ticking 'update all'" is the only difference I have seen people mention.

Perhaps I dont understand what the client does, and it's more than just a mod-updater. Either way I'm off to go search around the Curse/WowAce site, because I have a feeling I just asked the question hundreds of others have, but just in a different forum.

I really support you with your decision to change that much but security by obfuscation...sorry that argument is too poor.
--- it takes longer to find bugs
--- it takes longer to fix bugs
--- when neccessary you can get code of closed source

I don't see a reason to pay for the updater but being it closed source and the already mentioned( on wowace) problem with forced updates.

Whether it's closed source or not, what's to stop me from packet sniffing the protocol and writing a non ad version. It also seems fairly trivial to just mirror the source somewhere else and point the old updaters there.

It sickens me that a service that was once free and widely used is going to be taken over by VC capital, and then to make matters worse you are going to shove advertising down my throat.

I can't wait for roll over flash ads obscuring the "Curse.com Update Button ( only $10 )"

Centipedes in my World of Warcraft?? Sooner than you might think.

The data transfer per month was cited at 60 terabytes in peak months. One of the cheapest ways to handle that much data I know is Amazon's S3 service. If I tell Amazon's calculator that I want to push 60 terabytes in a month, the bill calculates out to a little over $8,000 a month, or $96,000 a year.

You couldn't use Amazon S3 to run an entire SVN, either -- it's not suitable for the purpose. So the real costs are probably substantially higher.

This has always been one of my biggest complaints about Curse (other than it just being an ugly, poorly designed site). Searching for a certain category of mod, you'll find 20 mods that haven't been updated in 2 years, and maybe a couple that have, if you're lucky. It doesn't seem to be any better from a server maintenance standpoint to have hundreds, possibly thousands, of mods that are unusable, either.

What I'd dearly love to see as part of this site redesign (which, as much as I've always disliked Curse, I'm so far very optimistic about) is a Report Outdated Mod tool. After enough people report a mod as non-functioning, it gets flagged for review. At that point, either it gets tested or an attempt is made at contacting the author to review or retire the mod, something like that. Hell, you could automate the whole thing if it's left up to the author to update it or retire it, and just automatically retire it if the author doesn't respond within a certain time limit.

Just how big is Curse these days?

1. If the main reason a user is on the curse site is to get addons, the search feature being painful is exactly the reason to bash the site. What good is any site if you cannot find what you're looking for easily? I think it's been said that it's more likely due to the extra results from pre-BC versions, derivative works, compilations, etc.

3. I think the accusations come from the ads on the page serving trojans. A user doesn't care whether it was the site or the site's ad network that attempted to load a virus on their machine. All they know is they went to Website.com and got a virus (or warning).

Like I said, only retards won't be able to find out which addon is the one that you need. I am not retard, and neither do all my guild mates who can successfully download an addon given name. Besides, how well(or really bad) is the searching function now in wowace/WAU? You need to type maybe more words to get the addon right and you can not tell jack from WAU or wowace. You need to install it to get to look at what the interface is like.

Repeat after me: Bandwidth IS NOT FREE!

Curse is not a charity, they will provide you a service, and you are supposed to pay them for that service. It sickens me that OSS fanboys don't want to support the service that is convenient for them.

Btw, nobody is shoving ads down your throat, you have the freedom not to use Curse service! It might make your life a bit more difficult, but heh, at least you won't be sickened anymore.

You are wrong. The key for a good software is good relationship between developers and users.

sigh

You don't seem to understand the basics here, buddy. First off, most of the big mods have pictures on their Wikipage(just like how Curse doesn't have pictures for everything). Secondly, sometimes they don't know the specific addon they want. I often will just look through the categories to see if I can find what I want. Problem is, if I want a "Map Mod", say, Cartographer, I've gotta sometimes go through 2, 3, pages before I find it. All the while, the number of files that HAVE cartographer, or ARE cartographer with a few extra things, are numerous and making shit more difficult than it has to be. Its not a matter of 'not being able to figure it out', its a matter of 'not having to spend more than 1 minute on the site at maximum'.


And as towards the Open Source argument you're trying to make: Why even give a shit about the relationship when you, or someone like you who knows how to code, can just fix the program yourself? Solves the problems near instantly. I'm not saying Curse needs to be open source, but that your argument against open source is not very good.

Ignoring OSS for the moment (I really don't want to get into that debate), I agree with some reservations. That "good relationship" has to include not just a steady stream of communication from both sides in terms of feature implementation, bug fixes, etc etc., but also a good foundation of trust. It doesn't matter how well a developer follows up on fixing bugs and incorporating features suggested by the community if, for example, they're willing to work with disreputable advertising companies that burn the end user, or their product randomly requests hard drive access for no good reason. It sounds like the latter of the two examples may be less of a concern with the new batch of people working on the software, but there's some ground to make up between Curse and the interface community for the former concern.

Last time I visited curse (a while before I found out about WoWAce, although it doesn't seem like much has changed), if I wanted an addon that I knew the name of, I'd either have to google it or pray that the addon never got abandoned, otherwise I'd face down between a tough choice between "Hot Potato Reborn", "Hot Potato 2.0", "Hot Potato (NEW)", "Hot Potato Extreme", etc. If you notice, when asking someone what's the addon they are using for bar mods for example, their replies will be "Bartender" or "Bongos", etc, basically just the name of the addon, not "Really Cool Bar Mod V4.1.2".

If I wanted to try out new fancy addons, I could either go to the newest list (which was often cluttered with "Random Compilation with Extreme Name Number 93102") or go somewhere else, since if I wanted to go through categories, I'd end up with half a billion outdated mods that didn't work.
Understand that while a large number of addons spread through word of mouth and such methods, there were quite a few because someone out there saw it on a download page and figured "Hey, this sounds cool, I'm gonna try it!".

Now, while WoWAce/WAU did not have a brilliant search feature, WAU's worked and WoWAce at least gave you easy access to addon categories and addon threads (which due to their nature, if it's a "good"/interesting addon, it'll generally be close to the first page).


Those are my main gripes with Curse, personally, I really like the idea of compensating addon authors, specially considering the work that goes into some addons (and the ingenuity of said addons), but I also doubt that I'll visit Curse for addons much since WoWI fills my needs (and so far there's really no reason for me to change).

Also, on the WAU side of stuff, while possibly impractical, the localization stuff should have been spread a bit possibly, since over 70% of my addon updates for a while have either been "Updated xxx localization" (and yes, I did stop running WAU after that) or updated libraries (in that case, maybe enforcing without externals would have helped a bit).

Let's focus on the issue, not to be derailed into arguing about the general merit of OSS here.

It is easy to go to curse.com and actually give me something hard to argue against, but you haven't done it.



Is the result of searching "cartographer".

Now, let's ignore the category, rating and hits to help the clueless navigate in cyber space, do you see the "Updated" time? Now would a reasonably smart person go click on the 2nd addon that has a pretty decent "Updated" time, or the ones with updated time 1 year ago and with a double digit hits?

And let's refute the wowace myth.

Where is the screenshot in Cartographer - WowAce Wiki?

They say one picture is worth 1000 words.


I agree.

As a minor digression, it's in vogue for small business owners to call themselves CEO's right now. I know of at least two or three business within driving distance from my house that do that, and they probably have no more than 5-10 staff members each. I don't know how large Curse is currently, but pretty much any business can have a "CEO" now.