Authors CurseForge

Hello,

and good day to you. I am writing this to let you know about a site I made. It's actually been around for a while, but hasn't changed much from its original (very much lacking) state after I stopped playing WoW nearly a year ago. Now that started playing again, I've finally gotten round to updating the website with some bits that I hope other people might find useful.

It was originally written so I didn't have to check three places whenever I was trying to find an addon, or check for updates.

You can see it here:

• http://fin.instinct.org/wowmods/

Here's a quick overview:

• lists updates to addons hosted on Curse, WoWInterface, and (*spit*) ui.worldofwar.net
• updates available for previous hour, day, or three days
• allows filtering by site
• allows advanced filtering using Perlish regular expressions
• supports favourites lists (for registered users)
• can be accessed via an RSS feed (which should show the same list as set after configuring any filtering)
• searchable database (8809 addons across all the sites so far) (I find this really useful when I can't remember where I saw an addon)
• can be added as a Google Gadget to an iGoogle homepage
• supports OpenSearch (at least, it should do!)
• includes detailed information for each addon
• where able, shows: links to sites able to be associated with the addon + changelogs + descriptions + details + update history + version numbers
• easy-to-use/remember URLs? (nobody else is going to care about this, are they, heh :)

Here's some links in addition to the main page, if anyone's interested in having a look:

• http://fin.instinct.org/wowmods/rss - to check out the RSS feed (I use it in Google Reader)
• http://fin.instinct.org/wowmods/find - I've tried to make it logical, could do with better highlighting)
• http://fin.instinct.org/wowmods/help/ - some text files with notes (include a changelog and todo list)

(Aside: just noticed ui.w are back to wowui.w - wtf? Another name change? Pff.)

It's not finished; there's lots more to do. But, now that there's finally favourites lists, I figured it might actually be useful for other people as well as me. :)

Any and all comments, criticisms, suggestions, and / or other similar communications, thoughts, opinions, and missives related, indirectly connected, or even nothing to do with the site are of course happily encouraged, welcome, desired, positively lusted over, and will find a soft warm home in my brain where they can relax with buttery toast and a nice cold alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage of choice and the fine company amongst peers and friends.

cheers,

- Fin

PS: Just a quick note to the guys at WoWAce / CurseForge / Curse:
Is there any chance you guys could make the RSS feeds a bit more useful, please? The CurseForge RSS feeds don't include version numbers for addons listed, don't list the author names or contact details, and seem to use the general description instead of changelogs. Also, I can't find the RSS feeds on Curse.com at all anymore. :( Are there any?

It's also quite frustrating never to hear anything back from any of the enquiries I've ever sent to Curse or WoWAce - I'm sure you're busy, but... any kind of response would be nice? The tickets I submitted on CurseForge disappeared, questions posted "official" (?) forums on Curse.com have gone unanswered, username requests have disappeared into the ether, questions asked (politely!) on IRC are ignored, emails have gone unanswered. It's just... like, do you even care? I know, I know, of course you do, but, arg, it doesn't seem like that sometimes. Hey ho.

cheers,

- Fin

Looks really nice(not from a design PoV)!

Just setting up my favourites there, but as Adirelle said already: files.wowace.com links are pretty useless nowadays...
And with that the newest versions and update dates of those addons only on wowace are completely wrong of course.

E.g.:
Link: http://fin.instinct.org/wowmods/addon/827:baggins
Version: 81829
Updated: Thu, 18 Sep 2008

but...
Link: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/baggins.aspx
Version: beta-2008-10-15-30000
Updated: 2008-10-15

What about a form where registered users can put the correct values in and you only have to confirm them?
Or do u generate the pages automatically? Then you'd have to kill files.wowace.com and use www.wowace.com/projects/ instead.

New Addons should be reportable somehow as well, Baggins_LibFilter or BetterOutbox are missing for example.

Edith says you should think about outdated addons as well and maybe add a link to report broken addons (most outdated addons won't work anyway because of the api changes, but some do (oGlow for example), so just deleting all "old" addons won't do it)

Quote from Adirelle

Your SVN URL are wrong and files.wowace.com links do not exist anymore.

Thanks. I've changed the labels to say "archive" - I'm inclined to keep the links themselves, as the point of the site is to try and provide as much information and as many pointers to resources as possible (even out-of-date stuff, as long as it's still accessible).

(Incidentally, I'd actually updated the links to Curse pages for all addons updated within about 30 days (I think it was 30 days) - I've updated all of them now.)

If anyone can think of anywhere else that I could point to, that would be great. (One idea I had today was to automatically do a search on forums.wowace.com for combinations of "<mod> official thread" or similar, and link to that if found? Not sure yet.) I've made myself a todo list here:

- http://fin.instinct.org/wowmods/help/todo.txt

Matrix110: thanks! I am historically absolutely useless at the design side of web development (even when I was running my own company, I was only ever allowed to choose the colours for one section of our site! heh): your compliment is much appreciated.

Melkae: the reason this is happening is because the site hasn't seen an update for Baggins yet, and the reason for that is that the Curse information wasn't working for a while (since the Big Changes), and the reason for that is because I stopped playing, forgot about the site, and only started again (and subsequently fixed Curse etc.) a couple of weeks ago. However, you do have a good suggestion, and it's one I'd like to address in the relatively near future. The site didn't have any kind of user registration before, and now that it does and I'm happy with it, I plan to extend the ability for people to be able to contribute information when possible. A couple of other ideas I had were user comments, and the ability for people to link entries in the database (not sure exactly how that's going to work yet, but I want it to be possible for, say, Addon v1.5.3 to be seen as just Addon; to be able to associate renamed entries to their new names; and to be able to assign addons to be marked as either dependent on others, or associated with others). Marking addons as broken is a great idea, thanks - I've added it to the todo list.

To answer your question though, yes, everything is generated automatically at the moment, all from the update feeds provided in various ways by different sites. (Hence my request about the Curse feeds to be more useful.) I used to import SVN logs from svn.wowace.com, they were great for detailed changelogs, but I don't think I'd be able to do that anymore. Plans include importing data from individual addon sources, but I want to figure out a more generic way of parsing SVN logs and RSS feeds than I currently have (there are individual parsers for each resource atm).

Wow! Wall of text crits you, etc. Sorry. :)

Thanks also for the kind comments (especially sylvanaar - promise I'll be back to helping you out (as much as I'm able) soon!) - I'm glad people are finding it useful. Hugs to Seerah as always. (Your husband is a lucky guy!)

Nice idea. Found a problem though: for some reason, attempting to deselect any of the sites from displaying in the list doesn't seem to work 99% of the time, and never sticks.