Bukkit

Attention all CurseForge authors, and other creative types!

Are you in Seattle for PAX Prime? Do you happen to be in the area for other reasons on Saturday August 30th? If so you are coordially invited to dinner and a show on us. We're going to start with dinner at the Triple Door and stay to watch Cards Against Humanity, the Nerdologues, and Improvised Star Trek for an improv show.

Dinner starts at 6:30PM, and the show is slanted to start at 8:00PM. You must be 17+ to attend, 21+ to imbibe alcohol. You're welcome to come hangout with us, the Feed The Beast Crew, and other authors, artists, youtubers, or who ever the cat may drag in...

Space is limited, so you'll have to RSVP by sending a PM using this link. We will confirm reservations as space is available.

6th Annual UI Author Dinner

It's that time of year again when we get together and have a great meal and hang out before Blizzcon kicks in full swing. This year we're looking at Thursday night around 9pm and will be within walking distance of the convention. For the last few years, we (Curse and WowInterface) have had the pleasure of picking up the tab for the evening, and we're glad to do so again this year.

If you'd like to attend please sign up over here.

Curse's 2011 Blizzcon Party

On Friday, October 21st from 8 PM to 2 AM on the 2nd floor of the Hilton hotel next to the Anaheim Convention Center, Curse will be celebrating BlizzCon with fellow gamers and VIPs. The party will feature an open bar, swag, live DJ, giveaways courtesy of our amazing sponsors, Logitech and Intel, and attendees from all over the gaming industry.

There will be several VIP’s in attendance including Felicia Day and other actors from the cast of The Guild, several of your favorite WoW community members, Vloggers, VCasters, and pro-players.

If you're an author, going to be at Blizzcon, and would like to attend (and haven't already got an invite) send me a PM with your name and email address.

Looking forward to seeing everyone again!

We're going to be bringing the repositories down temporarily for a migration. I'd expect the downtime to be less than an hour and will start within the next 10.

Update: We started a few mins late, but we're doing the final catchup sync now. We'll be done shortly.

Update: We're waiting on the final sync to finish, then we'll be turning services back on. Sorry for the delay.

Update: We're complete and back online, please report any issues with any repositories.

Age of Empires is back and we've got beta keys! This time it's online and with your friends. You can fight friends, co-op, and even build persistent cities.

Closed Beta for Age of Empires Online has been going for a while now, and Gas Powered Games is now ready to open the flood gates exclusively through Curse. Curse had had a chance to check it out at CES 2011 earlier this year, so be sure to check out our coverage.

We're stoked to be able to give you guys this opportunity to check out the game. This is a guaranteed spot in the closed beta, so be sure to get your key as soon as you can.

Initially, the giveaway is going to be limited to Curse Premium members. We'll be opening it up once premium users have had a chance to get ahold of their beta keys.

Details

• 
  
• Curse Premium giveaway: April 19, 2011 @ 9AM PDT to April 20, 2011 @ 9AM PDT
  
• General giveaway: April 20, 2011 @ 9AM PDT to when we run out of keys
  
• When you can play: Right away after redeeming your code
  
• How to play: See the instructions on the beta key giveaway page
  

There's no NDA for this phase of the beta, so feel free to contribute to AOE Wiki if you find information in the game that it's lacking.

Finally, here is the trailer from GamesCon 2010 for you guys to check out.

To al of our US users, and for those who may celebrate it otherwise.

On behalf of the site, our moderators and corporate overlords I wish you all Happy Thanksgiving. Be safe as you travel and enjoy the merriment.

Hey Guys,

I know that I stopped updating a few days ago when things started slowing down, so I wanted to officially say that the transition is done and that all services are online in our new datacenter and running on the new hardware.

At this point there may be a few known issues here and there, and of course there's always more to do. But if you're experiencing anything please make a ticket, and we'll get to it as soon as we can. If you're having some more urgent issue please feel free to PM me directly.

Thanks for the understanding as we've been transitioning everything and stabilizing things. Enjoy the shiny new hardware!

Kaelten

Hey guys,

Tonight I'm beginning the migration of the sites to our shiny new servers. This will unfortunately require that services will be taken offline as needed.

I'll try to keep everyone notified as things progress.

Thanks for understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Going to start posting updates below, if I forget all times given should be GMT-5 (except when Ackis posts).

Quote from Update Thursday 3:19PM GMT-5:

Know it's been a while since the last update. I wanted to let people know that we're doing good on stabilization front.

The Packager is up and running, and the approval queue is fixed. I'm keeping an eye on the error logs so that we know where we're at as far as that, and I'm about to bring the next round of services back online.

Quote from Update Thursday 9:55AM GMT-6:

There are still a few issues being worked out. File approvals can't be processed just yet, there's a few issues with the repo's as well. These are being worked on. If you do see any issues, please create a ticket (search first to see if an existing one is there) under the "Site Issues" link up top. We're getting everything fixed as fast as we can. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Quote from Update Thursday 3:55AM GMT-5:

All existing repositories are up and functional, however creating new repositories and packaging are still having issues. I'll be getting back on these things first thing in the morning.

Quote from Update Thursday 3:05AM GMT-5:

Hg is fully up and functioning. Please notify of any issues using it.

Quote from Update Thursday 2:05AM GMT-5:

Git is fully up and functioning. Please notify of any issues using it.

Quote from Update Thursday 1:11AM GMT-5:

Svn is fully up and functioning. Please notify of any issues using it.

Quote from Update Wed 11:30PM GMT-5:

I know it's been a long time since my last update but rest assured I'm still working.

I'm glad to say that svn+ssh access is now back working, I'm starting work on svn: now.

NOTE: if you use any of the ssh auth methods you may run into issues because the servers key has changed. On Linux based systems this can be found at /.ssh/known_hosts. I'm not sure about how windows handles that.

Quote from Update Wed 8:46PM GMT-5:

Got several issues worked out including one related to manually uploading files and the virus scanner. Sorry for those who got error messages.

Quote from Update Wed 6:27PM GMT-5:

We're seeing some packet loss in the new datacenter, but we're working on hard on getting it resolved.

Quote from Update Wed 6:00PM GMT-5:

If you're seeing this update you're on the new servers!

Repositories are still down, I'm working on a few things I'm noticing that are off and will be updating you guys shortly.

Quote from Update Wed 4:44PM GMT-5:

Repository access is disabled and a final copy has been started. Sorry for the inconvenience guys.

I don't have a solid ETA yet, but I'll update here when I do. I'm going to be brining the site down for a transition over to the new servers shortly.

Quote from Update Wed 4:25PM GMT-5:

I'm going to be disabling repository access shortly

Kaelten

I'm pleased to announce that this year we're again teaming up with Cairenn over at WowInterface to co-host the UI Community Dinner. It went great last year at Bubba Gump's and we're excited to have it there again.

Here's a copy of Cairenn's announcement over on WowInterface.

Quote from Cairenn on WowInterface:

Restaurant reservations are all made and confirmed. Here are the details:

When: 9:00pm, Thursday, 21 October 2010
Where: Bubba Gump's (about 16 min walk from the convention center, see downloadable map at bottom)

Appetizers
Bubba’s Far Out Spinach Dip - Spinach, roasted red peppers, artichokes, and monterey jack cheese make one of the tastiest dips you’ve ever had. Enjoy it with our homemade tortilla chips; and Mama’s Garlic Bread & Gump House Salad

Choose your entrée…
Bubba’s Bucket of Boat Trash - Deep fried shrimp, steamed lobster claw, and fried fish. Served with French fries.

Shrimp New Orleans - Lots of tender shrimp sautéed in butter, garlic and spices, served with Jasmine rice.

Dixie Style Baby Back Ribs - A pound of Baby Back Ribs slow roasted with sweet and tangy BBQ sauce and served with coleslaw and French fries.

Accidental Fish or Chicken - Broiled fish or chicken over a bed of Jasmine rice topped with shrimp, a lemon butter Sauce and Roma tomatoes.

Salmon & Veggie Skillet - Grilled salmon and fresh vegetables with garlic herb butter, served over rice.

Dessert
Chocolate Cookie Sundae - a warm, fresh baked chocolate chip cookie topped with vanilla ice cream, caramel, chocolate, peanuts and whipped cream.

Coffee, tea or soft drinks included. One specialty drink of your choice (alcoholic drinks available only with valid proof of age). Any other [specialty] drinks beyond that will be cash and carry.

The reservation is only for 42 people so please if you're serious about attending signup over in the thread on WowInterface.

Updated

This morning I restarted point generation, you may not notice much difference in the points you receive right now, however things will continue to be shifting around as time continues.

Also, point generation is at this point completely up to date. If you go back and count you'll see that there is a point batch for every day in the month even if they were ran on the wrong day. In future months we'll no longer have a big delay waiting on budgeting, and we can expect the points generated to shift day to day to accommodate changes.

Finally, I think everyone will appreciate the new display in the rewards point log, It's now per-day instead of per-project-per-day. You can click on the details link and see the breakdown per project.

As usual there is always a chance that something could be off with the new code, I'll be keeping an eye on it and respond to any issues as they arise.

Have a good week,

Kaelten

Happy Friday everyone.

We all love our Curse Author Reward Points, and there's some good news. The system is being reworked, upgraded and made fancier, however that means that points will be not be generated for a few days.

When the upgrades are complete, any missing point generations will be run.

There have also been a few erroneous point generations, and once the system does restart, there may be lower points for the first little bit to make up for those point generations.

Also, authors should note that the system will be more dynamic to accurately reflect addon popularity.

Sorry for any inconvenience that this causes, but rest assured that the system will be up and running again soon.

Now there's some more good news for everyone. There have been some changes to the back end of the site to speed things up. You may have noticed the site being more responsive. That's due to quite a few back end optimizations that have been worked on over the past week or so.

Another new feature that has been released to everyone is project based forums. These were in beta for quite some time, but have now been opened up to everyone. You should be able to access them via a link in the project management section, or something like http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/projectname/forum/edit/

Take care and have a great weekend.

Hi guys,

We're going to be doing a brief server maintenance in a few moments during which the main site will be unreachable, the repositories will still be up and working.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: and we're backup, sorry for the downtime there guys :)

Today a new Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader exploit became public knowledge. It's actively being exploited, and we could all be targets.

Quote:

Adobe has announced that an exploitable flaw in Adobe Reader 9.x, Acrobat 9.x, and Flash 9.x and 10.x has been discovered and is being actively exploited. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions are all affected. The flaw allows arbitrary code execution by attackers, and hence it is deemed "critical."

Read the full article at ArsTechnica

The article linked provides some details on how to protect yourself. But in summary, there is no current fix from Adobe. Downgrading to Reader 8.x can save you there, and apparently updating to the latest 10.1 beta of flash can help, but that seems scary in it's own right.

If you don't have an authenticator already, we'd recommend getting one. Pick your flavor:

• Physical Device (US Version)
• They have an iPhone app for that.
• Available on the Android Marketplace
• Download for some US cellphones

Be safe guys.

About a week ago Curse Premium turned a year old. Our CEO sent out this email to our premium members and I wanted to share it with everyone here as there are some stats in there you may find interesting.

This is a major milestone for us, and I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for the last year. I'm also happy to announce that later this month we're going to be celebrating the 2 year anniversary of CurseForge.

Thanks again guys. Here's looking forward to another great year.

Recently we became aware of a needed change in how we've been handling payments to international authors.

While we'll still not need to withhold anything, we do need to start collecting a W-8BEN for any Non-US Citizen who wishes to redeem more than $600 worth of points a year. More information can be found [[kb:store/tax-information/|here]] and [[kb:store/international-taxes|here]].

Nothing has changed for US Citizens. We still need a valid W-9 on file if a US Citizen wishes to redeem more than $600 worth of points a year. More information regarding this form can be found [[kb:store/domestic-taxes|here]].

I hope that these knowledge base pages will help people understand more about why we need these forms and how to get them to us. If there are any concerns or questions we'll do our best to address them.

The development team here at Curse has been hard at work on the Curse Client 4.0.

Crunch Gear was given a sneak peak at the newest alpha client, 4.0. It's been entirely rewritten to optimize performance, speed, and usability. Of course it's going to pack in some new features as well. It's only in Alpha so we can only share this screen shot of the updated UI.

I (Kaelten) also wanted to take the opportunity to post a screenshot of our upcoming mac client. Our mac users are important to us, and as a result most of my time has been monopolized by working on the new v4 Mac client. It's a completely native Cocoa app targeting 10.4 and will run on both intel and PPC macs. It's not as far along feature wise as the windows client, but again, I did want to make sure people know that it is actively being worked on.

For clarification the Windows one is the dark one, where the mac client is the silver one.

Mac Update 7/24

I just updated with an extra screenshot from today's alpha release. So please check it out. I hope you guys agree it's starting to come together. :)

Many people have very specific likes, and some people (like those with eye problems) have very specific needs. I think it's important to try to give a way for everyone to be able to use the site.

There are some very hard realities. We're not the greatest designers. At times we can bust our asses for days and be lucky to have something the won't make you run in terror. We're also under a very heavy workload and have a lot going on, and there is only two of us. So please keep in mind that the new design isn't really the target end point it's a stopping point into perfecting the main designs.

Approximately 25% of the users have voted a dislike for the new theme, with only about 17% showing a strong dislike. That's understandable.

For these reasons we've brought a theming system into the mix. It's currently not possible to replicate the old theme 100%, but it does give you a lot of control over the look of the website. The corners, the paddings, the fonts, and the colors, and more. We're also open to working with people to get more power added to the theming system so that their needs and wants can be met.

I'm hoping that as time goes by we'll be able to see an amazing set of templates that will provide to the needs of all of the users.

So I apologize to the people who are hating the new theme and want something different, or just the old one. However, I do thank you for all of the feedback and the honesty with us. Please keep it coming.

A few links people may find useful:

• The original announcement
• The listing of themes
• A happy cat