Recently Curse and WoWInterface got together to come up with a solution for an ongoing problem. The problem in question is WowMatrix. The reasons they are a problem are many:
- WowMatrix violates author copyright and intellectual property rights:
- They redistribute addons without authors' permissions;
- When they first started they would scrape the legimate sites for addons then upload them to their own site in addition to deep-linking from the sites;
- They edited authors' files to remove donation requests and links to their home sites, etc.; and
- They have failed on many occasions to honour authors' requests to remove addons from their application;
- In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of date. This leads to authors having users complain about bugs, bugs that were fixed days or weeks ago in versions that are available on the legitimate sites, causing problems for both the authors and for the end-users;
- Until the community raised a hue and cry, WowMatrix didn't even supply the authors' names as to who wrote the addon, let alone provide a link to where the addon was legitimately hosted;
- WowMatrix leeches from the legitimate hosting sites without permission, let alone compensation. Originally, they scraped our sites so they could upload addons to their own site without permission, in addition to deeplinking from our sites. They have finally stopped hosting the addons on their own site, but they still deeplink from our sites, using our resources to run their program. Curse and WoWInterface use a lot of bandwidth every month which costs a lot of money. The way we pay our bills is through site ads, which are directly dependent on users viewing them, and premium memberships. WowMatrix bypasses our download pages, and, as a result, people are not viewing the ads. Of course, this means the ads aren't generating any revenue to pay for the bandwidth. At the rate they were going, if they were allowed to continue using our resources without any compensation, they were going to drive us right out of business. Not only are they stealing our bandwidth and preventing us from being able to recoup that loss, they also have their own ads all over their site and application. They are directly profiting from the stolen bandwidth; and
- Due to the massive resource drains they put on our sites, we have all experienced heightened loads and weaker performance, especially on patch days. During those days they download so much from our sites that sometimes we have a hard time keeping up to the demands; thus causing legitimate users to experience problems accessing our sites. That's just flat out unacceptable.
For months now, both sites and multiple authors have been trying to come up with solutions to the problems caused by WowMatrix. However, WowMatrix just keeps ignoring authors' requests to remove their addons from their application, working around the protections we have put in place, and proving repeatedly that they have no intention of ever becoming responsible, legitimate members of the community. Instead, they choose to continue to leech off the community. Well we, Curse and WowInterface, have gotten together and between us we believe we may have found a solution to prevent them from pulling authors' addons from our sites to redistribute without permission and stealing our bandwidth any longer. Unfortunately we cannot release details on the solution, so as to keep it viable.
"Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah, get to the important question: What does this mean for me, your sites' user?" For the majority of users it should be completely transparent, you should not notice any difference whatsoever, other than improved site responsiveness during patch days. We hope that we will be able to revert the changes made to our sites eventually, if WowMatrix ever stops violating authors' copyright and ceases stealing our bandwidth and other resources.
If you were previously using WowMatrix to keep your addons updated, please use our official updaters (Curse, WoWInterface). You may also mark addons as favorites on both WoWInterface and Curse in order to be alerted when they are updated.
Kaelten
Administrator, Curse & WowAce
Cairenn
Administrator, WoWInterface
Huzzah!
i understand the reason you added the captcha and flash stuff to prevent linking, but you also force legitime users to enable javascript and flash on your site.
lets hope wowmatrix don't start using flash decompilers :D
honem, could be a fun new daily quest.
kudos on the change guys :D
Permission to bomb wowmatrix headquarters ?
I hope your combined efforts in finding a way to put an end to what WoWmatrix has been doing to all the addon authors. I know of some people that use that site. I have mentioned to them on many occasions that that site is not a good one. I even told them about the addons on that site being out dated. Plus I didn't like the fact that there are no screen shots, version numbers, in depth descriptions or user feed back on any of the addons there. That right there put me off from trying it out after I had heard about it from other players. I don't mind having to update addons one at a time or going threw and deleting the older version first before installing the new one. That allows me know if my WoW crashes, it is most likely the addon I just updated. Or it shortens the list of why. LOL
Keep up the most excellent job you do here also my thanks goes out to those on Wowinterface too.
it would definitely be great, if the two sites keep working together to create an updater, that supports both sites. well, i didn't like wowmatrix anyway because it messed up my addons. so grats on the good work.
I understand how frustrating it can be at times my friend. Please know that I'm willing to take any feedback you have on the client and see about working it into future client releases.
I was using WoWmatrix because it updated all my addons at once. I'm not happy that I'm being asked to switch to two different clients, one which apparently has a whole bunch of extra stuff I don't want and another which is old and might not work well. But I do understand the complaints about WoWMatrix and I support the choice.
Excellent work guys.
This is fantastic news, and I could not be happier. Thank you
I've heard reports of it crashing on startup, heh
yea just went ahead and tried it was pretty funny to see it fail miserably
they claim we're having a website error ;)
great job guys keep up the good work (am kinda tempted to install wowmatrix and see what happens when you try to download something from curse :P )
Im glad someone is finally doing something about this.
S-S-Suck it bitches!