Authors CurseForge

Ok, I'll try to be calm and polite, but if you're happy with what's happening, don't read ahead.

Let me summarize and let's see if I have everything clear:
1) Ace is a "developer community" it's right in the logo, top left of the page)
2) Ace had a massive growth over the time, way unexpected maybe, but nonetheless an incredible success
3) the amount of money needed to run and maintain it is no more affordable by normal means

-> a solution had to be found

Proposed solution: migrate and join Curse, since they founded Ace in the past.

This is where all started from, if I got it right.

Now, however, the problem arises, and I'll try to divide them in sections:

Section 1: Curse policy and Curse "behavior".
Curse isn't a no-profit organization, it's a company. I'll refrain to start consideration about Curse owners, because it's really unimportant. Curse is a company, so it have to make profit. Where do profit arises from ? Well, Curse have many (too many imho) advertisements, and that's a HUGE money income. No problem, it's market. They offer a service, it's their right to have incomes.
Problem is: why ppl go to Curse site ? Simple: because Curse hosts the addons, so developers willing to spread their work will post there, and users will go there to get them. Without the developers the users wouldn't go, no web pagehits, no advertisements, no money. So basically they're USING developers to make money. That's perfectly fine, but what about the developers that did NOT wanted to post on Curse and they used another, free, open way to distribute their work ? Who had the right to move them to Curse ? Noone in my opinion. The ones that are caring about this will soon remove their work from Curse, with more problems and angriness from the users. Who's to blame about this ? Think about it.

Curse updater:
It's bloated, bugged, it went tru massive beta phases and STILL it have inconsistent behaviors. It have features that re-enable themselves (autoupdater) and it send you to Curse web pages when you try to disable them. It doesn't support basic things like libraries unpacking (afaik) and it doesn't give enough control to the user. Its sources are not public, leaving doubts to its real behavior (I don't believe it's a trojan, but noone can prove it) and it uses a proprietary protocol, trying to block 3rd party updaters. Last but not least it's SLOW. Oh... and let's not forget that its promised MacOS version is promised but not even close to be considered an alpha release (from the reports I had). And let's not talk about UNIX users, I tried to use it tru Wine and I had a good laugh.

Timely operation:
When had the transition to be done ? When WoW 3.0.1 patch is about to come of course ! As is exactly when people will NEED to update ACE mods. So basically forcing them to use the new Curse updater or be screwed. And for MacOS users to be screwed in any case. Yes, you CAN update your addons manually, but try to do it and unpack libraries. You have to be a developer to do it right. Try to download a "basic" addon like Omen, you'll find yourself with a very outdated version. Sure, in the transition there are always some issues, but NOT if you work in IT. I do, and we're trained to let them NOT HAPPEN, or we're just fired. BTW, the very first thing we learn is: keep the new and the old service running in parallel for at least 15 days. Try the new service and THEN, after a ton of messages and warnings, do the final teardown of the old system.

All this can't be due to random events. Trust me, it's not a random crap. Someone decided that the transition had to be done before WotLK, no matter what. If possible before 3.0.1 patch. And that in order to have a lot of new customers installing the new Curse thing, because only with that they could fix their issues.

Curse Client (it's a client, not a simple updater...) development:
Closed, based on wxWidgets. Mmmm... why not Java ? Java is portable, can have good UIs, a Java application can mimic perfectly the UI of the horst it's running into. Go check OpenOffice. BUT Java apps are quite easy to reverse-engineer, as is the proprietary protocol used for updates and more would had been exposed. Isn't it ? Moreover the only released client (windows) despite its beta phase is still lacking of features and its behavior is far from good. It's not even a release candidate if you want my opinion.
I suggested a friend to try it, and the first thing she said was: "luck I stopped it before my whole addons folder was erased".

Curse Client "premium" services:
See point 1. The client is able to let you update your addons without visiting Curse web pages, hence lowering their pagehits and lowering the advertisements incomes. Hence Curse HAD to find a way to have an equivalent income from those using the client. This is economy, baby. But still... I'm using an updater to get FREE stuff (the addons), why should I pay YOU? I'd gladly pay someone else instead. Or at least I'd like to be able to choose. Instead of subscriptions a real marketing analysis would had suggested to push ads to the clients, with a premium service removing the ads. Eudora mail client had that for years. Premium service to enable features is just... CRAP.

Curse "syndication":
Addons should be syndicated by Curse... let me skip this point because i could become offensive. I've seen so much crap on Curse web site I hardly believe they're able to syndicate when they have to change underpants. Come on, they're not even able to check their web pages for browsers compatibility... On MacOS I have to use Firefox 'cuz Safari can't render their pages correctly... and Safari is not a piece of junk.

The missed opportunity (or the short minded boss):
Yes, in the whole thing you missed a f***ing great opportunity, to make money and to do something really important. You forgot to analyze the problem. However I'll just outline the problem, since I'd like to propose MY solution to the open-source developer community (btw, Curse is NOT a community, is a COMPANY) and to the computer science academic community. I think we can get a good number of public and private investors, hence I'll keep the idea for myself right now.

Let's state the problem:
- addons: made by small development groups, short snippets of code, usually under open-source, free copyright systems.
- addons developers: in total, a huge number of people, including developers, translators, etc.
- users: many, in the order of 100.000 to 1.000.000
- downloading frequency: from once per day to once per week.
- total bandwidth used: incredible
- total storage used: not so dramatic, but still high

Solution: none *right now*, beside the brute-force one: central distribution, lot of hard disks, lot of bandwidth. Bound to be extremely expensive. Soooo, there is space for what we call IMPROVEMENT. It's a strange thing that goes together with forgotten ideas like *research* and *innovation*. But you missed the train.

Anyway, to summarize: I'm totally pissed off with what's happening. I'll be forced to use Curse Client as well and this makes my stomach hurt. But the pain will always make me remember what was the Ace logo: "developer community". Thanks guys, you contributed to create it, and then you've sold it and killed it. You should be proud. At least I hope you'll get a good cash from this, as 30 coins aren't enough.

Cheers.

If i read again ACE i'm going to jump off the 7th floor, its Ace.

Curse Client "premium" services:
See point 1. The client is able to let you update your addons without visiting Curse web pages, hence lowering their pagehits and lowering the advertisements incomes. Hence Curse HAD to find a way to have an equivalent income from those using the client. This is economy, baby. But still... I'm using an updater to get FREE stuff (the addons), why should I pay YOU? I'd gladly pay someone else instead. Or at least I'd like to be able to choose. Instead of subscriptions a real marketing analysis would had suggested to push ads to the clients, with a premium service removing the ads. Eudora mail client had that for years. Premium service to enable features is just... CRAP.

The addons themselves are free, but the bandwidth needed to host those addons were not. With all the downloading going on it was pretty expensive so it's undertandable something had to change. I'm not too happy they merged with Curse but as always, money is the bottom line (in this case it was the expense). I still don't trust any downloader Curse puts out due to the trojan/spyware problem they had in the past, so I've moved over to wowinterface.com for now.

edit: I also really don't care for the new font, they get all blurry and hurts my eyes after a while.

Quote from Arzach

Anyway, to summarize: I'm totally pissed off with what's happening. I'll be forced to use Curse Client as well and this makes my stomach hurt. But the pain will always make me remember what was the ACE logo: "developer community". Thanks guys, you contributed to create it, and then you've sold it and killed it. You should be proud. At least I hope you'll get a good cash from this, as 30 coins aren't enough.

Cheers.

1. I doubt very much that the ACE developer community is dead or will die, they just had to move.

2. It doesnt cost anything for authors to be part of it.

3. The client, while beta and not done yet is FREE. Only some features will be for paying(premium) members, like the autoupdate feature.

If I knew about the problems with paying the bills for the bandwidth usage I would happily help out and I'm sure many others would too before "selling" to Curse.. But I didnt know. :-/

Well.. The Curse Client is a mess atm. I wont use it as it is now and definately not pay for it.

Quote from Arzach

Ok, I'll try to be calm and polite, but if you're happy with what's happening, don't read ahead.

Let me summarize and let's see if I have everything clear:
1) ACE is a "developer community" it's right in the logo, top left of the page)
2) ACE had a massive growth over the time, way unexpected maybe, but nonetheless an incredible success
3) the amount of money needed to run and maintain it is no more affordable by normal means

-> a solution had to be found

Proposed solution: migrate and join Curse, since they founded ACE in the past.

This is where all started from, if I got it right.

Now, however, the problem arises, and I'll try to divide them in sections:

Section 1: Curse policy and Curse "behavior".
Curse isn't a no-profit organization, it's a company. I'll refrain to start consideration about Curse owners, because it's really unimportant. Curse is a company, so it have to make profit. Where do profit arises from ? Well, Curse have many (too many imho) advertisements, and that's a HUGE money income. No problem, it's market. They offer a service, it's their right to have incomes.
Problem is: why ppl go to Curse site ? Simple: because Curse hosts the addons, so developers willing to spread their work will post there, and users will go there to get them. Without the developers the users wouldn't go, no web pagehits, no advertisements, no money. So basically they're USING developers to make money. That's perfectly fine, but what about the developers that did NOT wanted to post on Curse and they used another, free, open way to distribute their work ? Who had the right to move them to Curse ? Noone in my opinion. The ones that are caring about this will soon remove their work from Curse, with more problems and angriness from the users. Who's to blame about this ? Think about it.

Curse updater:
It's bloated, bugged, it went tru massive beta phases and STILL it have inconsistent behaviors. It have features that re-enable themselves (autoupdater) and it send you to Curse web pages when you try to disable them. It doesn't support basic things like libraries unpacking (afaik) and it doesn't give enough control to the user. Its sources are not public, leaving doubts to its real behavior (I don't believe it's a trojan, but noone can prove it) and it uses a proprietary protocol, trying to block 3rd party updaters. Last but not least it's SLOW. Oh... and let's not forget that its promised MacOS version is promised but not even close to be considered an alpha release (from the reports I had). And let's not talk about UNIX users, I tried to use it tru Wine and I had a good laugh.

Timely operation:
When had the transition to be done ? When WoW 3.0.1 patch is about to come of course ! As is exactly when people will NEED to update ACE mods. So basically forcing them to use the new Curse updater or be screwed. And for MacOS users to be screwed in any case. Yes, you CAN update your addons manually, but try to do it and unpack libraries. You have to be a developer to do it right. Try to download a "basic" addon like Omen, you'll find yourself with a very outdated version. Sure, in the transition there are always some issues, but NOT if you work in IT. I do, and we're trained to let them NOT HAPPEN, or we're just fired. BTW, the very first thing we learn is: keep the new and the old service running in parallel for at least 15 days. Try the new service and THEN, after a ton of messages and warnings, do the final teardown of the old system.

All this can't be due to random events. Trust me, it's not a random crap. Someone decided that the transition had to be done before WotLK, no matter what. If possible before 3.0.1 patch. And that in order to have a lot of new customers installing the new Curse thing, because only with that they could fix their issues.

Curse Client (it's a client, not a simple updater...) development:
Closed, based on wxWidgets. Mmmm... why not Java ? Java is portable, can have good UIs, a Java application can mimic perfectly the UI of the horst it's running into. Go check OpenOffice. BUT Java apps are quite easy to reverse-engineer, as is the proprietary protocol used for updates and more would had been exposed. Isn't it ? Moreover the only released client (windows) despite its beta phase is still lacking of features and its behavior is far from good. It's not even a release candidate if you want my opinion.
I suggested a friend to try it, and the first thing she said was: "luck I stopped it before my whole addons folder was erased".

Curse Client "premium" services:
See point 1. The client is able to let you update your addons without visiting Curse web pages, hence lowering their pagehits and lowering the advertisements incomes. Hence Curse HAD to find a way to have an equivalent income from those using the client. This is economy, baby. But still... I'm using an updater to get FREE stuff (the addons), why should I pay YOU? I'd gladly pay someone else instead. Or at least I'd like to be able to choose. Instead of subscriptions a real marketing analysis would had suggested to push ads to the clients, with a premium service removing the ads. Eudora mail client had that for years. Premium service to enable features is just... CRAP.

Curse "syndication":
Addons should be syndicated by Curse... let me skip this point because i could become offensive. I've seen so much crap on Curse web site I hardly believe they're able to syndicate when they have to change underpants. Come on, they're not even able to check their web pages for browsers compatibility... On MacOS I have to use Firefox 'cuz Safari can't render their pages correctly... and Safari is not a piece of junk.

The missed opportunity (or the short minded boss):
Yes, in the whole thing you missed a f***ing great opportunity, to make money and to do something really important. You forgot to analyze the problem. However I'll just outline the problem, since I'd like to propose MY solution to the open-source developer community (btw, Curse is NOT a community, is a COMPANY) and to the computer science academic community. I think we can get a good number of public and private investors, hence I'll keep the idea for myself right now.

Let's state the problem:
- addons: made by small development groups, short snippets of code, usually under open-source, free copyright systems.
- addons developers: in total, a huge number of people, including developers, translators, etc.
- users: many, in the order of 100.000 to 1.000.000
- downloading frequency: from once per day to once per week.
- total bandwidth used: incredible
- total storage used: not so dramatic, but still high

Solution: none *right now*, beside the brute-force one: central distribution, lot of hard disks, lot of bandwidth. Bound to be extremely expensive. Soooo, there is space for what we call IMPROVEMENT. It's a strange thing that goes together with forgotten ideas like *research* and *innovation*. But you missed the train.

Anyway, to summarize: I'm totally pissed off with what's happening. I'll be forced to use Curse Client as well and this makes my stomach hurt. But the pain will always make me remember what was the ACE logo: "developer community". Thanks guys, you contributed to create it, and then you've sold it and killed it. You should be proud. At least I hope you'll get a good cash from this, as 30 coins aren't enough.

Cheers.

Ok.. the forums ate my original reply ( I sooo want to find out whats doing that)

So I'll make this one short and sweet.

We are a business at Curse, we do want to make money. No reason to deny it. So do youtube, sourceforge, and many others who's main content is user generated.

We agree the authors deserve a lot more than they get now (which ranges from nothing to the occasional donation). Which is why our AuthorsRewards program is being started along side premium.

A portion of the proceeds from Premium will fund the AuthorRewards program.

We will be offering games, time cards, consoles, and amazon gift cards along with other things to the authors for all the hard work they've done.

Also the bug you mention in the client is fixed as of yesterday.

The mac client is working fine (or at least equivilent to the windows client) in most regards, I'm a mac user.

Also please don't pitch your idea here. We do have a general policy against non solicitation. Also it sounds like your idea will probably have something to do with p2p.

We've thought of it, as have many people in the community, its not a good idea. And since that'd put your company( yes company since you'dhave investors) in a position to profit not only on their hard work, but also on your users bandwidth. Wasn't that similar to your criticism of us?

Regardless. Yes there are issues, we are working as fast as we can to fix. them.

Well, I just spent about 30 minutes constructing a thought-provoking essay on my thoughts concerning the Curse Client, 3rd-Party APIs, business strategies, the oncoming train that is v3.02, Yeti's, and Microsoft Bob.

After creating that grand opus, I clicked the Submit Reply and got a blank screen. Client timeout. Opus went into the Great Garbage Collection in the Sky.

You win this round, Kaelten! But you shall rue this day! I shall have my vengence!

Same thing happened to me! I really really really really want to figure out whats going on its killing me.

You can still use WoWI's svns or github and still be part of this community you know... noone stamped a "property of Curse" logo on your ass or your addons.

Quote from Tekkub

You can still use WoWI's svns or github and still be part of this community you know... noone stamped a "property of Curse" logo on your ass or your addons.

Oh, so the tattoos were voluntary? They looked at me rather menacingly.

Quote from Tekkub

You can still use WoWI's svns or github and still be part of this community you know... noone stamped a "property of Curse" logo on your ass or your addons.

Haha, best reply ever :p

I still don't get the big rush was.

I'm sure people would have been relatively happy to move over to the curseforge entity if the updater/forum issues had been properly tested with a large number of people, eg run the old and new system side by side, or phased implementation.

You said Ace is a developer community, except that's the problem. Its a developer community that became too mainstream with non developers, and those non developers need to go (and I get a strong indication you aren't a developer from your post too, and if you are then you aren't one thats been active in the Ace community). So working with curse to give the non developers a way to get their addons from curse and give the developers better tools is a great partnership.

Quote from ms998

I still don't get the big rush was.

It was not rushed, you just don't like the timing.

Quote from ms998

... properly tested with a large number of people, eg run the old and new system side by side, or phased implementation.

It was tested. If you didn't help test, then you really have no right to bitch.

Quote from Arrowmaster

non developers need to go

My god how long have I been saying that? Users ruin everything!

Quote from OrionShock

@ OP, if i remember correctly, Kael works for curse.com and is/was the Admin of wowace.com... I wouldn't call that a sell-out.

Kael started at Curse well after he was with Ace. The move was entirely money-motivated (bandwidth costs), therefore it was a sellout. But we still love Kael... if only he'd grow a beard for us.

Lol, I appreciate the love, however, I don't really like beards... mine never wants to grow fast/full enough. And I do want to make more addons.