We discussed this 6 months ago. We were promised changes to the SVN system. But hey, it was all vaporware discussion, as I have not seen/heard anything since last October about the "new SVN format"
Ooh, that re-opens some not-so-old wounds >.<
Quote from Elsia »
It seems to me there are two issues here, one is how to handle depricated or broken stuff, and the other is the request to have a release quality distribution mechanism.
Yeah. For the first issue, the SVN should perhaps automatically hide stuff (or move it to some "stale" branch/repository as break19 suggested) that meets some kind of staleness criteria (perhaps a number of months, or of semi-major WoW patch revisions). It's not as bad as it sounds, because other authors will still have SVN access to those addons and will thus be able to check them out, update them, and check them back into the trunk (possibly with as little as a TOC bump, but one would hope that they'd exercise due diligence first to make sure there aren't tainting or compatibility issues).
As for the second issue, I was thinking maybe there could be a second version of files.wowace.com that packages versions tagged as release quality. The SVN trunk would still have beta-quality stuff.
Honestly that's only a band-aid though. What will really have to happen is updater support for release-tagged addons, because updaters are the main draw for people who want easy access to WowAce-hosted addons but aren't interested in testing.
And forget scaring away those end-users. Just drop it; it's just not going to happen, nor should it. You'll create such a wave of ill-will from the general WoW community that you'll wish WowAce never existed in the first place. As I've said before, wanting to turn back the hands of time on the WowAce community to exclude end-users is just plain silly. (Elsia: this paragraph was not directed at you, but at others I've seen expressing elitist/xenophobic attitudes towards general addon end-users)
Quote from Moon Witch »
Can I say something?
I will get loads of hate for this but ... wouldn't getting rid of WAU solve some of the issues? No more need to update it, no more "this and this isn't working" .. Everyone gets it from the site, those familiar with it will have no issues there. And less stress for poor Sylv.
WTF? There's no way in hell I'm going to manually update 50 addons, not to mention it will force me to go back to embedded libraries (eww!) in order to avoid having to update an effective 200 addons.
maybe make email an mandatory field in toc's .. and let the script sends emails if an addon is going to marked outdated to the maintainer.
^ Much Win ^
However, I would suggest, some authors dont really want to give out their email address due to privacy issues, but would happily give their website, or IRC nick.
Therefore I would suggest the following field(s) be mandatory, only one is required.
However, I would suggest, some authors dont really want to give out their email address due to privacy issues, but would happily give their website, or IRC nick.
just create an gmail address and forward it to your main email .)
-Addons that are more than 6months with out a commit(translation updates, and changes in libs wrt backwards compatibiltiy, ie parser-1.0 -> parser4. These updates don't count) and the author is more than 6months MIA or out of Contact then the addon gets archived out to a /archive folder. WRT to the files site, it keeps the last good zip before the addon got archived.
Very important to note that the Author has to go Missing or Out of contact for more than 6 months, either by IRC or forum post / activity.
-Addons that are more than 6months with out a commit(translation updates, and changes in libs wrt backwards compatibiltiy, ie parser-1.0 -> parser4. These updates don't count) and the author is more than 6months MIA or out of Contact then the addon gets archived out to a /archive folder. WRT to the files site, it keeps the last good zip before the addon got archived.
Very important to note that the Author has to go Missing or Out of contact for more than 6 months, either by IRC or forum post / activity.
I would say that if you want to do that, some effort to contact the author by e-mail or any other available contact information should be made first.
So you'd archive an addon that is widely used and functional but has no visibly active author or has an author but there just was no need to update it? Why?
Why not archive addons that are unused?
Going for the first will (a) cause an outcry by people who use it and (b) put them to the mercy of someone saying "alright I have time to waste to babysit this", when in actuality it didn't actually need babysitting at this point. Or (c) force work on present addon authors to put their happily working addons back onto the trunk.
For example bags_and_merchants hasn't seen an update since its initial commit of January 2007 (over a year!) and it works like a charm today of course. It's author is around but he'd have to spend his time rescuing the addon if mechanisms that archive by update-date (or blanket TOC cutoff, b&m quite correctly sits at 20003) are put in place.
If an addon naturally depricates (like the 2.0.1 patch did and the 2.4 will for parser based addons), I can dig this (i.e. then you can indeed meaningfully prune by TOC), but if the goal is to prune the repository, do it by a meaningful metric that doesn't cause upset or cause unneeded workload, not one that selects false positives and forces actions on people that was avoidable and may not even find broken and/or unused addons that are newer than 6 months.
Rather if an addon doesn't show use activity (or shows minimal use activity, i.e. just sporadic downloads and infrequent update requests) for 2 months I'd archive those. bags_and_merchants and other working addons that just don't need maintenance will be safe because many people are checking the addon for updates showing that it's installed and used.
In fact if people proposed to automatically archive addons that embed a parser lib after 2.4 goes live (and with a grace period), I could dig that. That's a meaningful metric.
For example bags_and_merchants hasn't seen an update since its initial commit of January 2007 (over a year!) and it works like a charm today of course. It's author is around but he'd have to spend his time rescuing the addon if mechanisms that archive by update-date (or blanket TOC cutoff, b&m quite correctly sits at 20003) are put in place.
That author wouldn't meet OrionShock's second criteria,
Quote from OrionShock »
and the author is more than 6months MIA or out of Contact
and would probably pass the "email him and see if he's still alive" test, either way.
Your "remove unmaintained addons" suggestion may result in a lot fewer false positives, but it would also result in a lot fewer matches, and many would actually be false negatives, e.g.: random user A has addon X in his Addons dir, but it's disabled on all chars because it's so horribly out of date and broken. His updater doesn't know any better, and dutifully fetches the addon's information from files.wowace.com just in case there's been an update. Your script says "yep, people are still asking about this one, so it must still be useful!"
Honestly though, I don't think this debate over archiving unused vs. unmaintained addons has any real purpose. The ones who have been discussing it are far removed from those in control of the changes.
Changing the files script: not so difficult. Changing the developers: difficult. You'll have to convince developers to start tagging before the script change or else there will be pain.
Though you still sound like you'd be interested in seeing the outcome, on a scientific level. Me toooooo!!! :)
(edit: Excuse the horrible grammar please. It's early, I only had 2 cups of coffee yet, and I am typing like mad to get a TeX-document done for uni today. :X)
I <3 the updaters, and frankly I think a bit of variety can't hurt.
Outside of the switch to the .NET-distribution (but that is unrelated to the whole handling of the addons, and meh, it's the authors choice - I don't personally like it the slightest bit, but I know it got it's strong points :P ), WAU is an amazing program, and no "clone" updater handles the raw updating and browsing anywhere as well.
Which in turn is no offense to the developers of any other updater, at least in my opinion.
WAU took the longest to develop, and is focused completely on providing perfect support for the files.-access.
Whereas other updaters cut some of the functionality or comfort, and add other strengths instead (multiple-sites-support with sites being equal instead of non-ace being tacked on, as one example - or JWowUpdater inherently running on all systems is another).
In itself, all works well, however the raw success of Ace2 accelerated it all too much, IMO.
All of a sudden, the users were everywhere where before only authors were exchanging code snippets and cleaning up each other's code. Design-functionality and looks started playing a very real role compared to codesize/speed, which I remember in the beginning was the alpha&omega of any addon posted here.
I do quite remember heated discussion about whether superior-implementation-X or superior-implementation-Y, which differ in speed in different situations, perform better for the average user. It's how it should be. I mean, arguments on a professional level between authors who ultimately know the other one is on the same side, just arguing their perspective, they are fine. They help!
Now if I can offer any "ideas", I'd do this. And yes, this is radical but I never was a supporter of "slow&steady" changes. The overall goal is to keep the user able to get addons based on Ace3 off the site, and provide feedback about addons. At the same time, wowace.com is to be a haven for the developers, not the users.
Change the wowace-access so only tagged files show up under files.wowace.com. Access to Trunk/Branches uses an SVN-client. No beta-access-website to the trunk either.
Remove any "user"-access to the forum, it's an exchange for developers.
Wiki-access is kept for anyone (it's a wiki after all!), as I can quite imagine many mod-authors would be very grateful if someone writes the docs for them? (hate documentating :X )
To become an author (getting an account) is a moderated process in which you have to say which addons you manage, too. So well someone who's just starting out can register, saying he got addons X, Y and Z in development, no releases yet.
Ofc, users could still try to register, but who would go through all that trouble just to be kicked off in a week or two because the other authors noticed you're not doing anything but posting about why you dislike addon X or Y.
This way the website would serve as an exchange of knowledge/ideas/work between developers of Ace2/Rock/Ace3 based addons.
Furthermore on the frontpage should be downloads to Ace3, and under a submenu downloads of the "outdated" Ace2 and it's updated alternative, Rock.
And yes, this'd pretty much kick Users (like me) out of wowace.com. I like that thought, seriously. :)
Feedback can still easily be gathered via providing a webform or a jira or something like that, right?
Also, further if the current "active" developers fail to reach someone from the site-admins, one could work on a complete move?
I cannot provide webspace, but I remember for example wowinterface.com had a special host for a now-abandoned project for an external Interface-organization program before.
Just as an example, it might be they're willing to provide a separate subpage which merely adheres to the visual style of wowinterface, and otherwise has it's own implementation of a Wiki with an added dev-only forum.
Then if they can set it up that way, tagging an addon would automatically add that "release" to the normal addon-bunch of wowinterface under the addon's name. And tagging a new addon not released yet would release it.
Now, this is only a theoreticaly idea in case the site-admins aren't in any way reachable, MIA and all. And I only used wowinterface.com as an example since I saw they had such a subpage already. No clue whether it's technically possible, they'd do it, or anything like that. :)
I agree with you that there are many issues that come together. Just my personal view on your proposed changes:
Quote from KnThrak »
Change the wowace-access so only tagged files show up under files.wowace.com. Access to Trunk/Branches uses an SVN-client. No beta-access-website to the trunk either.
I find it very helpful if testers can rapidly grab a beta, even if they are not SVN savvy.
Quote from KnThrak »
Remove any "user"-access to the forum, it's an exchange for developers.
I'd disagree to that. A lot of valuable input that I get comes from "users".
Quote from KnThrak »
Wiki-access is kept for anyone (it's a wiki after all!), as I can quite imagine many mod-authors would be very grateful if someone writes the docs for them? (hate documentating :X )
Oddly enough I'm kind of on the opposite end of this. I think addon authors should take more responsibility to document their work, not less.
Quote from KnThrak »
To become an author (getting an account) is a moderated process in which you have to say which addons you manage, too. So well someone who's just starting out can register, saying he got addons X, Y and Z in development, no releases yet.
I thought it already is a moderated process, and I certainly did say what my intentions were when I signed up.
Ummm, didn't know about the signup-process, sorry. Never started on addon-development so far, although I'm tempted to design a guildmap-addon for Mapster I don't want to implement inefficient code for efficient addons, and my LUA-knowledge is feeble at best. ;)
But I see your point about the forum.
It's tricky. On the one end, ofc a forum is the easiest way to get feedback, on the downside well... it's the easiest way to get feedback. Feature-creep requests, then in-thread-fighting over feature-creep vs streamlined approach, it's all very common.
Users constantly rub each other, too.
Not really easy to do I suppose. Maybe a bug-only forum, and any non-bug-related stuff will be deleted right off the bat.
Not really easy to manage.
There's also the issue that by now Ace2 expanded completely beyond what it once was. When Ace2 came out it was a miracle of embedded libraries, allowing the user to ignore the whole library business without ever worrying, but allowing the more tech-savvy users to de-embed the libraries for the "oldschool" feel and the slight improvement in speed.
However due to a steadily increasing popularity, the amount of mixins literally exploded. Back in Ace1 there were additional libs, sure. Plenty actually, given the scope of the Ace-community back then, but overall they were still... a handful.
Now there's a lot, and many of them are gigantic in size and scope.
Of course, it's not all bad in itself, it just scaled well beyond the point where a modauthor finds the community he's stepping up to "intimidating" (at least it seems to me like that, frustrated Author-comments are common :X ).
That's why I wrote that kinda, because it'd... in a way... artificially "shrink" the community back to the authors.
Again, locking end-users out of the WowAce community is a horrible idea, and won't improve anything. What's so bad about end-user influence that people feel the need to insulate developers from it? As Elsia said, just because someone doesn't know LUA doesn't mean they can't be a tester and provide meaningful feedback. Not only that, but there's nothing to say that all or even most WowAce developers don't care what end-users think about their work; in fact, I'll bet that most are like Elsia and prefer to have the end-users as an extra source of feedback and ideas.
I would suggest that user-phobic authors retreat to IRC and Jira and avoid the forums themselves, because they're the ones not fostering an environment of open, productive communication - not the end-users :P
I would suggest that user-phobic authors retreat to IRC and Jira and avoid the forums themselves, because they're the ones not fostering an environment of open, productive communication - not the end-users :P
You're saying that end-users that go "WTF! Yoo stipid SOAB broke wrkin addon? l2code lulz!" are not to blame at all? :)
Most updaters have a rollback feature, or can lock addons to a specific version. A broken addon is really no big deal at all. You roll back, maybe report the error to the author, and go on playing. I'd wager that authors would be less defensive and user-phobic if more users knew how to use their tools.
You're saying that end-users that go "WTF! Yoo stipid SOAB broke wrkin addon? l2code lulz!" are not to blame at all? :)
If I saw that happen regularly then I might feel differently. From what I've seen of the WowAce community as a whole, however, there currently seems to be primarily a culture of open communication between end-users and developers.
Most updaters have a rollback feature, or can lock addons to a specific version. A broken addon is really no big deal at all. You roll back, maybe report the error to the author, and go on playing. I'd wager that authors would be less defensive and user-phobic if more users knew how to use their tools.
If that's the problem then you may as well write that up as a tool deficiency (lack of intuitiveness, documentation and/or of user-friendliness). If a significant percentage of end-users aren't using, finding or understanding a feature that you think they should be, then you're expecting too much of them.
Well, problem might be that the program that you use to update is not the one that barfs errors at you. I do not think that you can get each and every user to react reasonably when faced with errors that seem to come from updating. Maybe you can improve it a tiny bit by putting a huge "What to do in case of errors"-button into WAU, but the effect would be minimal, I guess.
And you are right of course - while there are some people acting almost as stupid as in my example, the vast majority of posters here is just great. One of the main reasons why I love to hang around here. ^^ You can post without being flamed to pieces or drowned in 1337-speek within minutes.
And you are right of course - while there are some people acting almost as stupid as in my example, the vast majority of posters here is just great. One of the main reasons why I love to hang around here. ^^ You can post without being flamed to pieces or drowned in 1337-speek within minutes.
Indeed, and it should be mentioned that "posters" includes the addon developers too. I've seen a *lot* of authors that enjoy and respond positively to user feedback.
I like the way the WowAce community is now; that's why I rail against ideas that would destroy, damage or even significantly stifle the environment of communication that currently exists - especially when there's little demonstrable gain.
I like the idea of cleaning up, many addons are horribly out of date (90 days and more) a lot of them were rewritten and have an successor, and so on. I think there should be a several branch for these so they arent deleted completely but wont irritate the users.
31 grid modules , that often produce a bunch of errors. its to easy to just click "load out of date addons" ;)
The main points were already given so i just wanted to ask, if this topic will have consequences?
Great idea Industrial
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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Ooh, that re-opens some not-so-old wounds >.<
Yeah. For the first issue, the SVN should perhaps automatically hide stuff (or move it to some "stale" branch/repository as break19 suggested) that meets some kind of staleness criteria (perhaps a number of months, or of semi-major WoW patch revisions). It's not as bad as it sounds, because other authors will still have SVN access to those addons and will thus be able to check them out, update them, and check them back into the trunk (possibly with as little as a TOC bump, but one would hope that they'd exercise due diligence first to make sure there aren't tainting or compatibility issues).
As for the second issue, I was thinking maybe there could be a second version of files.wowace.com that packages versions tagged as release quality. The SVN trunk would still have beta-quality stuff.
Honestly that's only a band-aid though. What will really have to happen is updater support for release-tagged addons, because updaters are the main draw for people who want easy access to WowAce-hosted addons but aren't interested in testing.
And forget scaring away those end-users. Just drop it; it's just not going to happen, nor should it. You'll create such a wave of ill-will from the general WoW community that you'll wish WowAce never existed in the first place. As I've said before, wanting to turn back the hands of time on the WowAce community to exclude end-users is just plain silly. (Elsia: this paragraph was not directed at you, but at others I've seen expressing elitist/xenophobic attitudes towards general addon end-users)
WTF? There's no way in hell I'm going to manually update 50 addons, not to mention it will force me to go back to embedded libraries (eww!) in order to avoid having to update an effective 200 addons.
^ Much Win ^
However, I would suggest, some authors dont really want to give out their email address due to privacy issues, but would happily give their website, or IRC nick.
Therefore I would suggest the following field(s) be mandatory, only one is required.
## X-Contact-Info: break19 of #wowace/irc.freenode.net
## X-Contact-Info: http://www.non-existant-site.com/break19
## X-Contact-Info: [email]break19@dubioushost.com[/email]
etc.
## X-Contact-Info: [email]emailtemorarilydownormovedbutaddonactuallywellmaintained@host.net[/email]
## X-Contact-Info: someonewhoishardlyaround of #wowace/irc.freenode.net
## X-Contact-Info: http://unhelpful.webpage.info
## X-Contact-Info: justaddedthissopeopleleaveaworkingaddonthatdoesn'tneedmaintenancefreakingalone
Don't see that being administrable or meaningful.
Seriously, detect stale addons. That is administrable.
just create an gmail address and forward it to your main email .)
-Addons that are more than 6months with out a commit(translation updates, and changes in libs wrt backwards compatibiltiy, ie parser-1.0 -> parser4. These updates don't count) and the author is more than 6months MIA or out of Contact then the addon gets archived out to a /archive folder. WRT to the files site, it keeps the last good zip before the addon got archived.
Very important to note that the Author has to go Missing or Out of contact for more than 6 months, either by IRC or forum post / activity.
I would say that if you want to do that, some effort to contact the author by e-mail or any other available contact information should be made first.
Why not archive addons that are unused?
Going for the first will (a) cause an outcry by people who use it and (b) put them to the mercy of someone saying "alright I have time to waste to babysit this", when in actuality it didn't actually need babysitting at this point. Or (c) force work on present addon authors to put their happily working addons back onto the trunk.
For example bags_and_merchants hasn't seen an update since its initial commit of January 2007 (over a year!) and it works like a charm today of course. It's author is around but he'd have to spend his time rescuing the addon if mechanisms that archive by update-date (or blanket TOC cutoff, b&m quite correctly sits at 20003) are put in place.
If an addon naturally depricates (like the 2.0.1 patch did and the 2.4 will for parser based addons), I can dig this (i.e. then you can indeed meaningfully prune by TOC), but if the goal is to prune the repository, do it by a meaningful metric that doesn't cause upset or cause unneeded workload, not one that selects false positives and forces actions on people that was avoidable and may not even find broken and/or unused addons that are newer than 6 months.
Rather if an addon doesn't show use activity (or shows minimal use activity, i.e. just sporadic downloads and infrequent update requests) for 2 months I'd archive those. bags_and_merchants and other working addons that just don't need maintenance will be safe because many people are checking the addon for updates showing that it's installed and used.
In fact if people proposed to automatically archive addons that embed a parser lib after 2.4 goes live (and with a grace period), I could dig that. That's a meaningful metric.
That author wouldn't meet OrionShock's second criteria,
and would probably pass the "email him and see if he's still alive" test, either way.
Your "remove unmaintained addons" suggestion may result in a lot fewer false positives, but it would also result in a lot fewer matches, and many would actually be false negatives, e.g.: random user A has addon X in his Addons dir, but it's disabled on all chars because it's so horribly out of date and broken. His updater doesn't know any better, and dutifully fetches the addon's information from files.wowace.com just in case there's been an update. Your script says "yep, people are still asking about this one, so it must still be useful!"
Honestly though, I don't think this debate over archiving unused vs. unmaintained addons has any real purpose. The ones who have been discussing it are far removed from those in control of the changes.
Though you still sound like you'd be interested in seeing the outcome, on a scientific level. Me toooooo!!! :)
Pastamancer for admin \o/
I <3 the updaters, and frankly I think a bit of variety can't hurt.
Outside of the switch to the .NET-distribution (but that is unrelated to the whole handling of the addons, and meh, it's the authors choice - I don't personally like it the slightest bit, but I know it got it's strong points :P ), WAU is an amazing program, and no "clone" updater handles the raw updating and browsing anywhere as well.
Which in turn is no offense to the developers of any other updater, at least in my opinion.
WAU took the longest to develop, and is focused completely on providing perfect support for the files.-access.
Whereas other updaters cut some of the functionality or comfort, and add other strengths instead (multiple-sites-support with sites being equal instead of non-ace being tacked on, as one example - or JWowUpdater inherently running on all systems is another).
In itself, all works well, however the raw success of Ace2 accelerated it all too much, IMO.
All of a sudden, the users were everywhere where before only authors were exchanging code snippets and cleaning up each other's code. Design-functionality and looks started playing a very real role compared to codesize/speed, which I remember in the beginning was the alpha&omega of any addon posted here.
I do quite remember heated discussion about whether superior-implementation-X or superior-implementation-Y, which differ in speed in different situations, perform better for the average user. It's how it should be. I mean, arguments on a professional level between authors who ultimately know the other one is on the same side, just arguing their perspective, they are fine. They help!
Now if I can offer any "ideas", I'd do this. And yes, this is radical but I never was a supporter of "slow&steady" changes. The overall goal is to keep the user able to get addons based on Ace3 off the site, and provide feedback about addons. At the same time, wowace.com is to be a haven for the developers, not the users.
This way the website would serve as an exchange of knowledge/ideas/work between developers of Ace2/Rock/Ace3 based addons.
Furthermore on the frontpage should be downloads to Ace3, and under a submenu downloads of the "outdated" Ace2 and it's updated alternative, Rock.
And yes, this'd pretty much kick Users (like me) out of wowace.com. I like that thought, seriously. :)
Feedback can still easily be gathered via providing a webform or a jira or something like that, right?
I cannot provide webspace, but I remember for example wowinterface.com had a special host for a now-abandoned project for an external Interface-organization program before.
Just as an example, it might be they're willing to provide a separate subpage which merely adheres to the visual style of wowinterface, and otherwise has it's own implementation of a Wiki with an added dev-only forum.
Then if they can set it up that way, tagging an addon would automatically add that "release" to the normal addon-bunch of wowinterface under the addon's name. And tagging a new addon not released yet would release it.
Now, this is only a theoreticaly idea in case the site-admins aren't in any way reachable, MIA and all. And I only used wowinterface.com as an example since I saw they had such a subpage already. No clue whether it's technically possible, they'd do it, or anything like that. :)
I find it very helpful if testers can rapidly grab a beta, even if they are not SVN savvy.
I'd disagree to that. A lot of valuable input that I get comes from "users".
Oddly enough I'm kind of on the opposite end of this. I think addon authors should take more responsibility to document their work, not less.
I thought it already is a moderated process, and I certainly did say what my intentions were when I signed up.
But I see your point about the forum.
It's tricky. On the one end, ofc a forum is the easiest way to get feedback, on the downside well... it's the easiest way to get feedback. Feature-creep requests, then in-thread-fighting over feature-creep vs streamlined approach, it's all very common.
Users constantly rub each other, too.
Not really easy to do I suppose. Maybe a bug-only forum, and any non-bug-related stuff will be deleted right off the bat.
Not really easy to manage.
There's also the issue that by now Ace2 expanded completely beyond what it once was. When Ace2 came out it was a miracle of embedded libraries, allowing the user to ignore the whole library business without ever worrying, but allowing the more tech-savvy users to de-embed the libraries for the "oldschool" feel and the slight improvement in speed.
However due to a steadily increasing popularity, the amount of mixins literally exploded. Back in Ace1 there were additional libs, sure. Plenty actually, given the scope of the Ace-community back then, but overall they were still... a handful.
Now there's a lot, and many of them are gigantic in size and scope.
Of course, it's not all bad in itself, it just scaled well beyond the point where a modauthor finds the community he's stepping up to "intimidating" (at least it seems to me like that, frustrated Author-comments are common :X ).
That's why I wrote that kinda, because it'd... in a way... artificially "shrink" the community back to the authors.
I would suggest that user-phobic authors retreat to IRC and Jira and avoid the forums themselves, because they're the ones not fostering an environment of open, productive communication - not the end-users :P
Most updaters have a rollback feature, or can lock addons to a specific version. A broken addon is really no big deal at all. You roll back, maybe report the error to the author, and go on playing. I'd wager that authors would be less defensive and user-phobic if more users knew how to use their tools.
If I saw that happen regularly then I might feel differently. From what I've seen of the WowAce community as a whole, however, there currently seems to be primarily a culture of open communication between end-users and developers.
If that's the problem then you may as well write that up as a tool deficiency (lack of intuitiveness, documentation and/or of user-friendliness). If a significant percentage of end-users aren't using, finding or understanding a feature that you think they should be, then you're expecting too much of them.
And you are right of course - while there are some people acting almost as stupid as in my example, the vast majority of posters here is just great. One of the main reasons why I love to hang around here. ^^ You can post without being flamed to pieces or drowned in 1337-speek within minutes.
Indeed, and it should be mentioned that "posters" includes the addon developers too. I've seen a *lot* of authors that enjoy and respond positively to user feedback.
I like the way the WowAce community is now; that's why I rail against ideas that would destroy, damage or even significantly stifle the environment of communication that currently exists - especially when there's little demonstrable gain.
31 grid modules , that often produce a bunch of errors. its to easy to just click "load out of date addons" ;)
The main points were already given so i just wanted to ask, if this topic will have consequences?
Great idea Industrial