Hey beautiful people, ckknight here.

We at Curse.com are holding three contests for addon authors within the Curse Network (i.e. WowAce and CurseForge). The grand prize for each contest is a BlizzCon ticket. You'll be able to compete in all three contests, but you can only win one BlizzCon ticket total. We're also going to be providing Author Reward Points for runners-up.

Note: for the BlizzCon tickets, we won't be providing travel costs. You'll have to get to California on your own. Also, you need to be at least 18 years old.

The contests will run from now until June 15th, you can submit any time from here until then, and you can also revise your entries up until that point.

You can find the contests at http://beta.wowace.com/contests/. Yes, this is the beta site for WowAce, but it still should work fine, the contests system was easier to make with the new system than having to backport it. CurseForge authors shouldn't have a problem logging in or submitting entries.

• Alphabet mathematics
• Befunge-98
• WoW Avatar

We're hoping that by having these coding challenges, it'll be a bit more fun and interesting than giving out tickets to the top 3 authors or holding a simple raffle.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we've had to temporarily disable subscription signups for premium. There is a issue with PayPal and we'll have this worked out as soon as possible. Anyone who mistakingly received a canceled subscription email from PayPal will still receive uninterrupted Premium Service for the remainder of your subscription term.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience and I'll keep you guys updated as things continue.

(UPDATE) This was fixed on saturday, again we apologize for any inconvenience anyone has had.

Hello, friends.

Donation buttons are now part of the Curse Client v3.0.0.5, which is great news for authors (including myself).

As it stands, users need to update the addon in the client in order to see the new donation links, but once that's there, they're quite visible.

Screenshot of the client:

Because the paypal button in the example uses the "Paypal" (non-hosted button) type, it shows up as OneBag3 (from WowAce.com) when clicked on WowAce, OneBag3 (from Curse.com) when clicked on Curse, and OneBag3 (from CurseClient) when clicked from inside the Curse Client. This should allow you to know where your donations are coming from without just guessing.

Hello, friends.

We're launching Curse Premium today and I'm sure some are wondering about the effect that Premium will have on authors.

All authors will have complimentary premium. Yes, this could lead to gaming the system and creating fake projects for the sake of it, but we have a manual approval process, and we will investigate any reports of said gaming. Please, don't ruin it for the real authors. It will be one or two weeks before complimentary premium is provided for authors.

We are also launching our Author Rewards Program (ARP). 20% of the revenue generated from Curse Premium will go towards the ARP. Some of you may have heard about it, but I'll describe it now:

One of the main reasons Curse.com has become so successful is due to the addons it distributes. These addons obviously are created by the addon authors, our content producers. As a way to reward our content producers, we are launching the ARP. We will grant addon and library authors Reward Points (henceforth called points) based on said addon's popularity; for libraries, it will be based on the popularity of the addons using said library.

Points will start accumulating now that premium is launched, but the CurseForge author store will not be available to redeem from until details have been worked out, likely a month from now.

We aren't going to release the full details of the algorithms we use to calculate points, to help limit gaming the system, but the general idea is as such:

1. Every day at 16:00 UTC, we start the point generation
2. An addon (or library)'s score is generated with our algorithm.
3. Score is then compared against all other addons, to calculate the percentage.
4. We then multiply that percentage by the amount of points we're granting that day, and grant the result to the project.
5. The points of the project are then subsequently divvied up based on the project manager's reward splits.
6. Points can then be spent at the CurseForge store to redeem for various items, currently Amazon Gift Cards (we will expand our inventory in the future). Note: we will support some non-United States goods and more may be added on request.

There are some complications with all this, though:

• If you redeem more than 12000 points in a given year, we will need extra tax information from you. Since this will occur for only a handful of authors, we will work with you on a one-to-one basis.
• Due to tax issues and the like, there will be a new terms of service agreement that you will have to agree to in order to accrue points. Our lawyers are currently reviewing this and it should be ready soon.
• For non-United States authors, there may be extra tax issues related, which we should be able to work out on a one-to-one basis. Authors who have already opted-in will have to agree to the new terms of service in order to use the store.

We've already started granting points to authors. To see your points, go to http://www.CurseForge.com/home/ and check the bottom-left.

Update: Authors should now have free premium if you have a project with at least 1000 downloads. The 1000 number should hopefully limit gaming the system somewhat. If you have a legitimate addon, getting 1000 downloads should not be hard to do, especially with the number of users that use Curse.

A few months ago myself and Adamar took over the actual development of the Curse Client. In that time we've taken it a long way, bugs have been squashed, ui's have been polished, and the experience has been streamlined.

However, we are by no means satisfied.

We've listened to the feedback brought to us by our users, we've examined them, and we've studied our options. In the next major release we're going to be doing a lot of things.

Some of these things include:

• New features, such as UI Synchronization between computers.
• Cleaner, more intuitive, interfaces.
• Bugs will be squashed and problem code will be eliminated
• No more popup progress bars!
• Enhanced support for firewalls and proxies.

For our Mac users we'll also be bringing:

• PPC Support
• 10.4 Support
• A true, native feeling custom UI.

We are dedicated to the client as one of our most important products and will be investing as much time, energy, and caffeine as is needed to address the needs of our users.

I'll be keeping you guys updated as we progress including screenshots, screencasts, and further announcements.

Hello friends, ckknight here.

Previously, we haven't been tracking Curse Client downloads as something that would increment our download counters. This has now been fixed so that every download on the Curse Client will properly increment the download counters now.

Already we're seeing a _dramatic_ increase of downloads. It's really a wonderful sight to see how many users are really downloading my addons.

Note than from one refresh to the next, the download counts might not update, as there is heavy caching in place, but every download is still counted.

In no way, shape, or form are we "faking" our numbers, we try to be as accurate as possible.

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

As just about everyone knows, recently Blizzard released a new policy that covers standards addon developers must adhere to in order to ensure their addons will not be blocked from running in the game. Part of this policy said that you cannot solicit donations from within the game as it is considered to be a form of advertising.

Yesterday, we pushed an update to Curse.com that displays donation info on the addon details page and download pages to support authors who have spent their free time enriching the gaming experience for everyone.

For Users
Not everyone is able to donate, and even if you can doesn't mean you have to by any means. However, for those of you who can afford and are inclined to donate I'd recommend asking yourself a simple question:

When you setup a new copy of WoW or clear all your addons. What addons must you have before you're willing to play?

Those are the addons I'd personally consider donating to.

For Authors

To setup donation info just follow the steps below.

1. Go to your project's page on CurseForge or WowAce
   
2. From the actions select "Edit donation info"
   
3. Complete the form and hit the "Edit donation info" button
   

From all of us at Curse.com, I'd like to thank all the addon authors out there who spend so much time developing addons that makes all of our gaming experiances that much better.

Happy Coding!

This is an April Fool's joke

If you're an addon author like me, you probably got in the game for the sweet, sweet ladies. It just seems that meeting them has been a pain, so Kaelten and I (ckknight) have been collaborating on the design of the new CurseForge.com dating system.

Through our dating system, you, an addon author, can easily pick up the fangirl honeys. You will be put through a rigorous test to check for your 57 points of compatibility that will be automatically matched with fangirls in the community based on their previously made forum posts.

You may be wondering, "ckknight, how awesome is this?" The answer is obviously lots. Lots awesome.

From our initial run, due to the small authorbase (relatively) and the large fangirl base, we will be able to assign up to 274 unique fangirls to each author. So if you feel self-conscious about a date with one, or didn't realize you had lettuce in your teeth, don't worry, just skip that one and go to the next. We have a speed-dating system set up so that you'll spend 3 minutes with one girl and then move onto the next. Unlike other speed dating you may have seen, read about, or participated in, you will be the only male with upwards of 20 to 30 females all wanting a piece of you. Remember, these are girls who already love you and probably have a shrine to you and for you.

We at CurseForge.com want to give something back to the author community, and this is the best way we know how.

Do I hear wedding bells?

Hello friends, ckknight here.

Some of you may be wondering what the next step for CurseForge/WowAce might be. You may have seen the piles of tickets that the CurseForge project has and it can be disheartening.

So, I'd like to let you know that development absolutely has not stopped. We have limited resources with regards to manpower, as it has been essentially just one person (me, ckknight) doing nearly all the work on the site itself. Kaelten has been working furiously on the Curse Client, and I think we can all agree that it has blossomed under his guidance.

I've been working on the upcoming Author Rewards Program and Author Store, for when we launch Curse Premium and the Author Rewards Program soon.

The current gameplan is to completely overhaul the HTML and CSS on the website. While we previously had a frontend developer working with us, that is no longer the case and hasn't been for about a year, causing general bad practices to leak into our display code. This will lead to an overall greater polish for both WowAce and CurseForge. Things will also be very easy to change and add to in the future.

As it stands, if we want to add any new features, wrestling with the CSS has become a case of the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, where anything we do can cause a ripple effect, leading to slower development and an overall lack of polish.

Once this is finished, the website should act a lot more consistently, provide a better user experience, and allow further extensibility in the future. Also, we'll be able to call ourselves "Web 2.0" if we have rounded corners and gradients, right? ;-)

For an idea of some of the future ideas we have, so you know that we actually have future ideas:

• User-submitted guides
• Web-based repository browser
• Ticket enhancements
• Various bugfixes and small features.

If you have any ideas, we're more than willing to hear them through CurseForge's ticket system. Also, if you see a good idea, feel free to vote it up. That's a big reason on how we prioritize the next thing to do.

Curse Client 3.0 Release

I just wanted to take out a few moments and let everyone know that friday we released the 3.0 client to our entire userbase. It's been a long time coming, but I feel it fixes the majority of issues people have raised.

Some of the highlights:

• Redesigned User Interface
• More accurate addon identification
• Revaluated Defaults settings
• More features (including whether or not to use embedded libraries)
• Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements

Not only that but....

Mac Client 3.0 Beta Release!

We managed to get you a mac client beta out on Friday as well! This was a personal victory for me as I'm now actively working on the code for the mac client. In addition to the above changes we are happy to announce that updates are now done through Sparkle (same update mechanism used by Adium, Textmate and many other mac apps).

We are still in beta here as wxWidgets' implementations can drastically differ on mac vs pc, as a result we're working hard to iron out issues, and will be putting out updates all this week until we're at a more stable point.

However, there are a few...

Known Issues

Upload mistakes

Over the last week we've had a few authors mistakenly upload either the wrong file or files with invalid layouts that have caused the client's fingerprinting to mistake people's folders for the wrong addon.

Two known examples of this are Ace3 and Auctioneer getting flagged as Tournament Realm Spy and epgp. We've fixed it server side however the client won't just 'forget'. You'll need to remove the false match and in some cases reinstall the new correct match.

Mac Issues

• A crash that can happen on load in the sort routine
• A soft crash where the client stops displaying data and buttons fail to do anything
• Menu options being decidedly 'unmacish'

Reporting Issues & Discussion

Windows

• Reporting issues for the windows client
• Curse.com forums for the windows client

Mac

• Reporting issues for the mac client
• Curse.com forums for the mac client

General

• WowAce.com's Updater's Forums

Hello, friends.

Up until now, CurseForge and WowAce (since the transformation to the CurseForge codebase) have used "Curse Wiki" as the default wiki type. We have implemented the feature-rich WikiCreole markup and plan to make it the default on Monday (March 9, 2009).

What's wrong with Curse Wiki?

Curse Wiki is a custom implementation of the MediaWiki markup. The code we use for it is rife with issues, including lack of readability, inherent slowness, potential security issues and general bugs, and lack of extensibility.

The developer of the Curse Wiki format has no longer been with us here at Curse, Inc. for a year now, and no one can read his code, and when anyone tries, it's impossible to cringe.

Why choose WikiCreole over something else?

We agree with the philosophy of WikiCreole, the code is clean and readable, it's fast enough for our use cases, and the library we use (CreoleParser) is very extensible.

Due to the awesome extensibility, we were able to add nice relative links, e.g. [[Some page]] or [[Project:Some page]] rather than forcing full links as we have. We also support images nicely, e.g. {{4}} or {{Some image}} or {{Project:4}} (and so forth).

We were also able to add syntax highlighting with the <<code>> macro.

print("Syntax highlighting is awesome: " .. 42)

See Markup Types / WikiCreole for the full syntax examples of WikiCreole.

Will I still be able to use Curse Wiki?

Yes, this will still be an option, just not the default one.

We may eventually disable creating new pages/comments using Curse Wiki (likely if a security issue arises), but we would still allow old pages using it to continue to be editted as Curse Wiki.

Are you getting rid of any of the other markup formats?

Probably not. We've cleaned up the code for plain text and Safe HTML, and made BBCode a thin wrapper around WikiCreole, so we see no reason to remove those three at all.

We may eventually support more formats, such as Textile, Markdown, Restructured Text, etc.

We've had a bug in the forum's login script that was accidently clearing emails from accounts. This would prevent people from receiving emails or any other notifications.

Also I've revamped several chunks of our dns records, reverse dns, and spf records.

This should help increase the reliability of receiving email in general.

Hello everybody.

All of the knowledge base articles have been reorganized to be nested. This will make them easier to browse, however some links in the articles themselves may not work anymore. We'll be fixing those up over the next little while.

Just wanted to make sure all of our authors had a chance to signup to win the Reactor by Hardcore Computers we're giving away on curse.com.

I've signed up, but I'm probably not eligible :(

Anywho, signup here if you're interested.

What's New‽

What were the issues again?

   * Ignoring manual deletions
   * Installing over addons
   * Downgrading addons
   * UI feedback failures
   * Poorly worded options and button text
   * Too much automation in some places, too little automation in others
   * Lack of features that are considered defacto standards
   * General reliability 

What we did about them!

UI Changes

The old client

The new client

New Features

   * Alternate Packages - It's back!
   * Dependency Resolution
   * Manual Deletion Detection
   * Alpha Support
   * Multiple Game Support - Even over network drives!
   * Version Pinning
   * Submodule support 
   * Saved Variable Scrubber - It's not 100% tested and polished yet.
   * Automated and Manual Backups 
   * Real Configuration Box - The game manager takes the place of most options.
   * Deletion before upgrade
   * Uninstalled Package Listing - It's the unknown addon listing.

Changed Behaviors & Methods

Discovery and Detection of versions

If anything we're too conservative now. We've gone through extraordinary pains to make sure that we know exactly which version of the addon you're using. If we don't know, we don't touch it. It can still get a little confused sometimes, mainly if an addon is shared by more than one project. We'll be working out a tweak for that situation shortly.

Changes to Defaults

Yep they got changed. You may not like some of them, but you shouldn't find them offensive!

Popup Questions

Well, 99% of the time you'll never see a popup question. Unless you're doing something that you can't undo. Like deleting an addon. We don't want a misclick to make you a sad panda...

The Mac Version

Conclusion

Links

• 2.1 Installer: Use this link to get the latest client installer.
• Feedback Tracker: Please try not to put up a bunch of repeats!
• Forum Thread: I'm keeping the old thread, also linking to the current page. not the first one.

There were many e-mails sent out regarding projects which were marked as inactive.

These e-mails, in the format of:

We're sorry, your project, <Project Name> (http://wow.curseforge.com/projects/project-1234/), has been marked as inactive on CurseForge/WowAce.

Recently the site upgraded its project status component and as a result all projects which have been previously merged or deleted were marked as inactive again, causing the e-mail to be sent out. Your main projects have not been affected in any such way.

-Note from Kaelten: Yea guys, we apologize for the mixup. We've already patched the cronjob so that such a thing won't happen again. Also for those of you who have many projects that were marked as inactive last night sorry for the span :)

Hey all, we're planning on having a downtime on Monday, January 19, 2009. Planning on starting around 10 AM CST and it shouldn't last more than a few hours.

This will affect the repositories and the website, but not forums.

We're planning on migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL, since we've had just far too many issues with InnoDB locking up the database making the entire site inaccessible for minutes at a time, and we can't afford to lose transactions and ACID compliance by switching to MyISAM. Here's hoping it fixes the problem.

Addendum: And we're all done. Very anti-climactic, if you ask me.

Sorry for the brief outage.

The issue has been fixed, just click login in the top right as usual and the forums should log you in without issue.

Hello, friends.

We're doing some maintenance on the forums system, moving boxes around in the server room and all. We expect the downtime to last no more than a couple hours.

To pass the time, here's a kitty:

Hey beautiful people, we're gonna have another downtime today.

Hopefully this won't take too long, but it's always hard to gauge.

We're transferring the DB back to the real DB server, which has been upgraded to a newer OS as well as 64-bit, so we can finally use 8 GiB of RAM instead of just 2 GiB.

Addendum: And we're done and everything went smoothly.

Hello friends.

We've been having some DB issues with wowace and curseforge, so we're going to be doing some tinkering on the DB server.

I'm sure some of you have noticed the long pauses when trying to visit pages on wowace and/or curseforge, and our hope is to fix this issue.

We predict that the downtime shouldn't be more than a few hours, but it's always hard to gauge these things.

We also plan to have another downtime soon to finish the task, though probably not today.

Addendum:

We're back up, people. It only took half an hour, which we're very pleased with. There still will be another downtime later, but probably not today.

Projects with no activity over a period of six months are automatically marked as abandoned.

To mark a project unabandonded, simply go to the Actions drop-down, and select Unabandon project, check the Confirm box and click Mark Project as Unabandoned.

• You can now include a subfolder from mercurial and git repositories as externals.
• You can now include tags from mercurial and git repositories as externals.
• You can now specify to use the latest tag of a project as an external.

   externals:
       libs/LibStub: svn://svn.wowace.com/wow/libstub/mainline/tags/1.0
       libs/CallbackHandler-1.0: svn://svn.wowace.com/wow/callbackhandler/mainline/trunk/CallbackHandler-1.0
       libs/LibMonkey-1.0:
           url: svn://svn.curseforge.net/wow/libmonkey-1-0/mainline/trunk
       libs/LibBanana-1.0: 
           url: git://git.curseforge.net/wow/libbanana-1-0/mainline.git
           tag: 1.2
       libs/LibSuit-2.0:
           url: http://hg.curseforge.net/wow/libsuit-2-0/mainline
           tag: latest
       libs/LibSubThingy-2.13: http://hg.curseforge.net/wow/libthingy-2-0/mainline/libsubthingy-2.13

I hope everyone has had a great Christmas, or observation of choice. Sorry I didn't post it earlier, my internet is spotty atm.

Anyway, blessed holidays to all!