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 At noon today, Kaelten of WowAce fame posted a thread on the WowAce forums discussing the future of their massively popular project. There's quite a bit of nitty gritty coder lingo that you don't really need to know unless you're involved in WowAce, but there's other important information for us normal folk, too.

First, a few obvious things are pointed out. One, WowAce became big. Really, really big, and I imagine much bigger than they had ever imagined. The way WowAce is set up doesn't work so well with that much of a load and that many mods and packages being developed. Additionally, the amount of bandwidth they used monthly is absolutely enormous.

To quote: "As it currently stands files.wowace.com pushes out an incredible amount of addon updates. In an average month we're talking about more than thirty terabytes of data! In a busy month clearing sixty is no problem, and I don't even want to talk about what happens on major patch days."

As you can imagine, you sort of need a little funding to keep up with that. Their relationship with Curse has allowed some help with hosting, but the WowAceUpdater and the like still need a little financial backing. As we know from before, ad-based revenue did not really work out for them for various reasons, one of which is probably the shaky security concerns WoW has had combined with the old flash exploit targetting flash-based ads, I imagine. Because of this, Kaelten's primary note of his post is that WowAce will be using CurseForge's software and the WowAceUpdater will be no more, with Curse's client taking its place. For the fine details, head on over to Kaelten's thread. This is a little frightening for the people that rely on the WAU, but Kaelten is directly involved with the CurseForge project, so this will actually allow him to contribute more to WowAce, as he points out.

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Originally posted by Kavanagh:
Shit, did they discontinue support as of today then?

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 Hi guys. Kaelten here. Over the last three years or so we, as a community and a website, have changed a lot. We started off with very little, just a simple forum and three guys, then people came, and people went, we got a wiki and changed forum software. Then we started sponsoring and hosting an official ace svn and allowing other authors to use it, and well that kinda changed everything. When you guys started killing our svn server we had to start hosting zips and things changed again. Lastly when pprovost wrote the first version of WAU it all went crazy. Now here we are with a wiki, huge forums, one of the largest repos around, and hosting more than 1.3k projects with several hundred more locked away in tags. The evolution of the path described here is amazing, and I continue to be shocked at how far you guys have taken us. And now its time for WowAce to be reborn.

Many have commented on the limitations, and shortcomings of the current framework and the various issues we have in the current system. These include:

* No differentiation between stable and beta builds.
* No real project management.
* No sane issue tracking.
* Maintenance issues of the ever growing repository.

This is by no means an all inclusive list, but should showcase some of the less esoteric issues. These issues by no mean devalue what we currently have either, it's worked well enough so far, but I believe it is time these problems are addressed.

As many of you know I work for Curse.com, and they have been funding WowAce's servers for quite a while; without their support we'd have to have shut our doors on several portions of the site long ago. Also, many of you may know that I am project lead for CurseForge.com. I've poured all of my knowledge and expertise that I've gained from working with WowAce into CurseForge. In doing so I actively and continually strive to avoid the same pitfalls that WowAce has, and on a daily basis I take feedback from the authors that use it and incorporate their ideas and respond to their criticisms. I'm also excited to say that I will continue to develop and improve CurseForge's software for the foreseeable future, and that it is by no means considered 'done.'

Because of these things, I've petitioned and received approval to deploy the CurseForge Software for use on WowAce.com.

This means a lot of things will change, but there are things that aren't going to happen either. Please listen and read the rest of this as I attempt to outline the coming changes in more detail. I'm going to start going over things section by section to answer some basic questions.

The Repository

Arguably the heart of WowAce's content, the repository, is important for many reasons and it will continue on... in a fashion. Currently each folder under trunk is more or less an individual project, but they are all clumped together in the single repository. This has had many complications including permissions issues, slow downs, and maintenance issues. The management overhead on the current repository is monumental and takes large chunks of several peoples time. This overhead continues to grow in correlation to the repository's size and popularity.

Again, it is time to fix these issues.

I'm going to split the repository (by methods so arcane and time consuming I cringe) into separate repositories. From these I will gather all the information possible and create projects on the new site. In the continuing spirit of the current repository all of these repositories will be open so that anyone can commit to them, and it will be up to the individual owners whether they wish to close them off or not.

The Wiki

The current wiki works, but is generally unstructured, and things don't always map back to the various projects like you think they would. All data currently in the wiki will be preserved and carried over to the new site. These pages will be categorized by project and attached to the appropriate content, by hand if need be.

The Forums

The forums will be retained in their entirety and will undergo the least amount of changes. The main being is that they'll be imported into vBulletin. Unlike other content on WowAce the forums will be shared with CurseForge, in order to offer more competent and complete support for both communities.

Files and WowAceUpdater

files.wowace.com and WAU and their popularity has come as a surprise to us all. As it currently stands files.wowace.com pushes out an incredible amount of addon updates. In an average month we're talking about more than thirty terabytes of data! In a busy month clearing sixty is no problem, and I don't even want to talk about what happens on major patch days. While this has indeed been very amazing, it has been a mixed blessing. The ads on the files homepage and inside of WAU have been an attempt to offset the costs. They have failed.

Unfortunately, these cold realities have forced me to make some hard decisions in relation to these features. files.wowace.com will be discontinued, in its place we'll be using the same syndication framework as CurseForge.

In addition, WAU will, for the time being, be discontinued as well as it won't be receiving any new content. In the immediate, however, WowAce's content will be available via the new Curse Client that is in development. The new client will be a great departure from the current one, and I'm glad to say I'm in a position to influence its future development, and I will continue to use this influence to push for the features that you, the community, want to see.

As far as the timing of what I've outlined here, it's not going to be immediate. I'm looking at rolling out the new site towards the middle of August. I'll, of course, be announcing the exact date once we get a little bit closer to the big day.

I know that this will be taken differently by all of you, and I'm sure that there are many questions. This is a major change, but I for one am excited. Because of the common software used on both WowAce and CurseForge I will be in a position to develop features and fix issues on WowAce fulltime. This will be the first time that I'll have been able to commit that level of effort towards the site.

In the meantime, myself, and some of the others leaders here will be answering some questions, however, we're going to host a few irc chats on monday to answer more questions. The first will be at 12pm CST (7pm CEST), the second will be at 7pm CST (2am CEST), these times are meant to allow anyone who's interested attend. The chats will be held in a temporary chat room, #wowace-upgrade, on freenode, and logs will be posted in the forums. During this chat we'll be answering questions about the software rollout. In addition, we'll also be discussing or answering questions regarding some future plans including a joint AuthorRewards program.

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