Work with the Curse Community

Xyntress — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:35:08 GMT

Noticed last post was in 2007. I'd have to say in 2009, you guys are doing a fantastic job so far with very few problems.

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net — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:41 GMT

We already have got more than 30 mails, keep them coming.

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Jadieh — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:40 GMT

Mind me asking why the last updeated date on all addons has suddelny become todays date thus making my favourites page *useless*? This happened the other week as well. :(

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Guillotine — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:39 GMT

Jadieh:

That was a bug occuring because the entire site was updated. It shouldn't happen again.

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Despraci — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:38 GMT

Just an FYI.. the site is all jacked up again.. you seem to pick the worse times and days to do a site update when a patch goes live.

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net — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:37 GMT

Despraci, in what is it jacked up right now please?

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j3fff — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:36 GMT

Guys: the only thing you are constantly doing is crashing your website. I've never seen a website both so popular and so unstable like this. I'm a big fan of this site but it's constantly got huge issues. Get it together!! Good luck.

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Iflana — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:35 GMT

I appreciate your willingness to work on this website and the effort put forth, however I do not believe it is headed in the positive direction intended. Curse is becoming less and less of a thorough, content oriented, reliable resource gamers. It has exploded with ads, can't keep up with traffic loads, and there is an excessive amount of "Server Errors" which essentialy block out any browsers that did manage to get through the traffic from accessing the content.

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Guillotine — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:34 GMT

Iflana: The server load actually has nothing to do with v3. It has to do with the fact that the patches recently have required nearly all addons to be reinstalled. This means more people are coming here at once. We are working on the errors, and they should be coming less and less common. If you have any specific suggestions for a different layout, post them on the forums and we'll take a look.

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deboette — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:33 GMT

I think he means that curse doesn't have a low bandwidth / server strain version to reduce server stress. The site is absolutely murdered on patch weeks.

The move to 2.0~ where the site was not able to be accessed for 2 weeks+ because of such a complex site design probably smoked the http server.

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Iflana — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:32 GMT

The appearance of the site is great as a general statement -- very professional and clean (apart from the ads). My thoughts were more based around the accesibility and functionality aspects of the website, which seem to suffer more and more as the design of Curse advances. I'll try to explain more.

You can have the coolest looking site with the most information and addons out there, but it doesn't do your visitors any good if they can't access it; this is where server connection problems and the inability to keep up with traffic loads comes into play. People can't view sites that their can't establish a connection to, or that don't load in their browser. People don't want to sit here repeatedly hitting the "Try Again" link, for who knows how long, before he or she can get a connection to the site.

Likewise, if the visitor can access the site but then it doesn't function as intended, they are left in the same frustrating situation; this is where the problem with internal server errors comes into play. People don't want to click the "Download Now" link, again for who knows how long, before the internal server error gets troubleshooted and corrected.

The comment about ads was concerning content orientation. I personally feel like I'm searching the pages for the Curse content, which is squeezed in between numerous ads for every page. Some of them are pretty large and flashy, and they outweight the content sections causing me to lose focus on what I really came for. Isn't this equally frustrating as visiting a site and having to close 3 pop-up windows before you can see the page?

With that being said, I believe that a lot visitors are seeing repetitive road-blocks along the way to getting what they came for, if it is even possible for them to access it. How long will it be before people start going to another site because they can get what they were looking for without all the frustration and run-arounds?

I would really like to see Curse put additional efforts into obtaining a server upgrade, or whatever it is determined would correct the problems outlined. I don't come to a site because it looks nice -- that is just an added bonus. I come to a site because I can get what I'm looking for or accomplish something meaningful/useful. If I can't do that at one site, there will be another that is trying to do the same. Maybe it doesn't look as cool, but it doesn't matter because it serves a purpose more effectively.

On a bit of a note, a lot of the other sites have implemented a more than reasonable solution for peak patch days by having a "Low Bandwidth" version of their site, which still allows their visitors to get what they came for when the servers can't keep up.

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net — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:31 GMT

Dear Iflana,

We just upgraded our webservers to more RAM. Let me explain you what happened. We are using Django, a new high tech framework that has never been used on such high load, we are sort of beta testing ourself, meanwhile this allow us now to have very fast developement.

We figured out that the framework we use is eating a lot of memory, HTTP servers were using disk swapp and it was killing the performances, we had very strong CPU server hardware and normal amount of RAM, now we are going to have extreme amount of ram.We do beleive now that we have most of the problems sorted out.

I would like to appologize for all the down times we have got lately, our goal is to serve all of you everyday, not to have a site down.

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FynexFox — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:30 GMT

I'm sure it is obvious at this point, but in case it isn't let me inform you as to what errors I am getting. When download files the .zip archive is always corrupted, I have tried decompressing it with WinZip and with WinRAR, no good. I hope you get this problem fixed as I need a few mods to compile for a package release, this site has the best selection of mods, and the more mods than I have seen at any site. Please keep it functioning.

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Nimloth — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:29 GMT

@ FynexFox While we are working on fixing these files, you do realize that 99% of these files will not be working due to the 2.0 patch and will need updating to work, right? ;) Even if they were downloadable, without editing them all yourself, you would be releasing a bunch of stuff that doesnt work, heh.

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j3fff — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 06:37:28 GMT

I don't care how many ads you want - put as many as you can fit for all I care; but don't be ignorant like Blizzard and allow your website to crash each and every patch. Learn from your mistakes and keep the site up. Every time I think this site is stable, the next day it's the same problems again.

I am supportive of your site but have to be realistic about the problems over the past few weeks; please take it as constructive criticism and keep working on server stability; content doesn't matter to most people because they just want the addons/updates.

Good luck.