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- In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of date.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
Comments
After reading this article, I'm not finding that very hard to believe at all.
Also, to be quite honest, you're just not going to have a good chance of convincing people to stop using their software until you make your own software as convenient and user-friendly as WoWMatrix's. As of the last time I gave the Curse Updater a shot, it was clonky and gave you a huge hassle any time you had an unrecognized addon. Given that I've had no bad experiences with the program, I'll continue to use it for the majority of my updates (I do use Curse when WoWMatrix fails me on something), at least until you can provide me a reasonable alternative.
Every single person I've known who used the curse client has had problems. Computer crashes, cant get rid of the client, ended up with spyware. There are a lot of us who dont trust YOU.
I used WowAceUpdater until in no longer worked and I was told it was no longer supported. If you want to compete, make a better product. Most people dont have enough time to update 200 individual addons every day. I certainly dont.
It's like American car companies saying the Japanese stole all their technology. Well, then why do they make better cars than you?
Second, using it is stupidly easy.
Third, Curse client is a steaming pile of manure that does all kinds of things I do not want it to do and it does it all poorly. It is far from easy to use, in my experience.
Fourth, anyone claiming they got hacked using wowmatrix is a moron. It is infinitely more likely that they were hacked at wowinterface or curse, both of whom host countless adds and are therefore vulnerable to flash-based vectors.
TL;DR: You're dicks and I hope you die a slow death for trying to waste my life on this stupid, hideous, site.
I heard from a friend your mother was a skank. See, anyone can spread rumors and innuendo. Your claim is all but factually impossible, given how wowmatrix works. In fact, Curse is exponentially more likely to give you a virus, as they host flash-based ads.
As far as the client spreading viruses or malware, there are no basis for any claims of this. Our client is malware free, and our update server is secure.
Assume demand for addons is inelastic, in that either they get it from curse direct or through wowmatrix. By using wowmatrix, my assumption is that you only suffer the file-download bandwidth cost, with zero web content being delivered, then you're consuming less overall for the transaction. This shouldn't be understated. Yes, with wowmatrix one downloads many files in rapid succession, but that is the bloody point. It is simple and fast. You want constructive criticism? make your client simple, fast, and all about one singular purpose. Until then... I curse you.
However you're missing the point.
Bandwidth is measured in mbits/second, not transactions. So it refers to the amount of active traffic not the number of active downloads.
When we blocked WowMatrix today our bandwidth usage dropped ~ 30%, and that was at a non peak time.
As far as the client, that's not constructive, that's overarching design goals, which I think if you'll try the current version you'll find we've made huge strides towards having an easy to use, fast, and reliable client. The current feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. :)
Let me get it installed, and see if it will take my up-until-today wowmatrix managed addons and: recognize all of them, update them as needed, and do it all in under a minute.
I guarantee I'll be back with something constructive to say about this.
I'll go ahead and state though that addons edited/reorganized by wowmatrix won't be recognized.
Nor will addons not hosted with us.
It gives this message:
"Based on your file structure, we've determined that you previously used WowMatrix. The WowMatrix addon updater often edits and moves files in a way the addon author did not intend. This can make addon identification difficult, and in some cases impossible. If the client is unable to find a match for a folder, please go to Curse.com and search for any missing addons by name"
I can't verify this claim, but I can offer this anecdotal evidence: it and all my addons had always worked just fine. It even accepted all the add-ons I had installed prior to my first use. I suppose I'll just go over here to this nice curse website with its nice flash ads, and... /sigh
Firewall issues aside,(one can't be too careful, given the kind of things that have happened in the past: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1189), it has improved dramatically since I forsook it for wowmatrix. One might even say you took some overarching design goals into account. =)
As I said, it didn't recognize about 6 add-ons at all, but you get a pass on most since a few probably aren't updated any longer. Here's what it missed completely:
Aceprofit (buggy for a while, I think it's been dropped)
Carbonite (on offer at wowinterface and carbonite's site?)
Combatstats (I forget what I use this for? uninstalled)
EasyMother (ok, probably not necessary any more, haha)
SquawkandAwe (this is an actively maintained mod, not sure why it isn't on curse.)
Outfitter (RIP - bliz policy backlash?)
Let's take a minute to try the Find an Addon feature...
Carbonite? nope?
SquawkandAwe? nope
Outfitter? nope
I'll assume for the moment that the latter two are due to bliz policy repercussions, but something tells me it'll only be true for the last.
I still bet I get to look forward to the client fighting with my firewall again, hopefully I can get it trained and it won't freak every time it updates itself.
Well, it isn't as terrible as it was before... that's positive, right? Still, if I had a choice, (hahahahaha, I don't, see, it's funny), I'd have stuck with the other updater any day.