Wowmatrix did provide a good service, but they did not go about it in a good
way. They could have tried to work with the community to find ways to
address the concerns people had, but didn’t. Here is the message from the
admins or curse and WoWi that explans things in more detail
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Recently WoWInterface and Curse 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:
a) They redistribute addons without authors’ permissions;
b) When they first started they would scra.pe the legimate sites for
addons then upload them to their own site in addition to deep-linking from
the sites;
c) They edited authors’ files to remove donation requests and links to
their home sites, etc.; and
d) 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In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of
date.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 scra.ped our sites so they could upload
addons to their own site without permission, in addition to deep-linking
from our sites. They have finally stopped hosting the addons on their own
site, but they still deep-link from our sites, using our resources to run
their program. WowInterface and Curse 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, WoWInterface and Curse, 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.
