WowAce

It's that time of the year, when that wonderful Blizzcon event is going on.

A bunch of Curse staff will be there (Kaelten, Ckknight) along with many addon authors.

So for those of you who are going (or have already left) have a safe and fun Blizzcon.

As everyone knows by now Wow's 4.0 patch hit the US yesterday, and now the EU servers are up as well.

I just wanted to remind everyone that the new TOC # is 40000, and that to get a new update out to the majority of your users with this you'll need to flag a new file as a Release build.

We're seeming to be pretty stable overall, which is great given how much has changed in the hosting situation in the last few weeks.

If you do have any issues please do make sure to report them, as this is probably one of the most stressful weeks we'll have on the whole network for sometime.

Hope everyone has a great rest of the patch day and enjoys the new 4.0 systems and content!

(I'm posting this on sc2mapster as well since it could affect the performance/stability for you guys as well)

If you are looking to update an abandoned or inactive project, please read CurseForge/WowAce Policy on Inactive and Abandoned Projects first.

Cool Links:

Interface files for 4.0

Wishing all of our Canadian friends (like me!) a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving. May you have a wonderful turkey coma. :)

Hey Guys,

I know that I stopped updating a few days ago when things started slowing down, so I wanted to officially say that the transition is done and that all services are online in our new datacenter and running on the new hardware.

At this point there may be a few known issues here and there, and of course there's always more to do. But if you're experiencing anything please make a ticket, and we'll get to it as soon as we can. If you're having some more urgent issue please feel free to PM me directly.

Thanks for the understanding as we've been transitioning everything and stabilizing things. Enjoy the shiny new hardware!

Kaelten

Hey guys,

Tonight I'm beginning the migration of the sites to our shiny new servers. This will unfortunately require that services will be taken offline as needed.

I'll try to keep everyone notified as things progress.

Thanks for understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Going to start posting updates below, if I forget all times given should be GMT-5 (except when Ackis posts).

Quote from Update Thursday 3:19PM GMT-5:

Know it's been a while since the last update. I wanted to let people know that we're doing good on stabilization front.

The Packager is up and running, and the approval queue is fixed. I'm keeping an eye on the error logs so that we know where we're at as far as that, and I'm about to bring the next round of services back online.

Quote from Update Thursday 9:55AM GMT-6:

There are still a few issues being worked out. File approvals can't be processed just yet, there's a few issues with the repo's as well. These are being worked on. If you do see any issues, please create a ticket (search first to see if an existing one is there) under the "Site Issues" link up top. We're getting everything fixed as fast as we can. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Quote from Update Thursday 3:55AM GMT-5:

All existing repositories are up and functional, however creating new repositories and packaging are still having issues. I'll be getting back on these things first thing in the morning.

Quote from Update Thursday 3:05AM GMT-5:

Hg is fully up and functioning. Please notify of any issues using it.

Quote from Update Thursday 2:05AM GMT-5:

Git is fully up and functioning. Please notify of any issues using it.

Quote from Update Thursday 1:11AM GMT-5:

Svn is fully up and functioning. Please notify of any issues using it.

Quote from Update Wed 11:30PM GMT-5:

I know it's been a long time since my last update but rest assured I'm still working.

I'm glad to say that svn+ssh access is now back working, I'm starting work on svn: now.

NOTE: if you use any of the ssh auth methods you may run into issues because the servers key has changed. On Linux based systems this can be found at /.ssh/known_hosts. I'm not sure about how windows handles that.

Quote from Update Wed 8:46PM GMT-5:

Got several issues worked out including one related to manually uploading files and the virus scanner. Sorry for those who got error messages.

Quote from Update Wed 6:27PM GMT-5:

We're seeing some packet loss in the new datacenter, but we're working on hard on getting it resolved.

Quote from Update Wed 6:00PM GMT-5:

If you're seeing this update you're on the new servers!

Repositories are still down, I'm working on a few things I'm noticing that are off and will be updating you guys shortly.

Quote from Update Wed 4:44PM GMT-5:

Repository access is disabled and a final copy has been started. Sorry for the inconvenience guys.

I don't have a solid ETA yet, but I'll update here when I do. I'm going to be brining the site down for a transition over to the new servers shortly.

Quote from Update Wed 4:25PM GMT-5:

I'm going to be disabling repository access shortly

Kaelten

I'm pleased to announce that this year we're again teaming up with Cairenn over at WowInterface to co-host the UI Community Dinner. It went great last year at Bubba Gump's and we're excited to have it there again.

Here's a copy of Cairenn's announcement over on WowInterface.

Quote from Cairenn on WowInterface:

Restaurant reservations are all made and confirmed. Here are the details:

When: 9:00pm, Thursday, 21 October 2010
Where: Bubba Gump's (about 16 min walk from the convention center, see downloadable map at bottom)

Appetizers
Bubba’s Far Out Spinach Dip - Spinach, roasted red peppers, artichokes, and monterey jack cheese make one of the tastiest dips you’ve ever had. Enjoy it with our homemade tortilla chips; and Mama’s Garlic Bread & Gump House Salad

Choose your entrée…
Bubba’s Bucket of Boat Trash - Deep fried shrimp, steamed lobster claw, and fried fish. Served with French fries.

Shrimp New Orleans - Lots of tender shrimp sautéed in butter, garlic and spices, served with Jasmine rice.

Dixie Style Baby Back Ribs - A pound of Baby Back Ribs slow roasted with sweet and tangy BBQ sauce and served with coleslaw and French fries.

Accidental Fish or Chicken - Broiled fish or chicken over a bed of Jasmine rice topped with shrimp, a lemon butter Sauce and Roma tomatoes.

Salmon & Veggie Skillet - Grilled salmon and fresh vegetables with garlic herb butter, served over rice.

Dessert
Chocolate Cookie Sundae - a warm, fresh baked chocolate chip cookie topped with vanilla ice cream, caramel, chocolate, peanuts and whipped cream.

Coffee, tea or soft drinks included. One specialty drink of your choice (alcoholic drinks available only with valid proof of age). Any other [specialty] drinks beyond that will be cash and carry.

The reservation is only for 42 people so please if you're serious about attending signup over in the thread on WowInterface.

Hey all, ckknight here.

As many of you have discovered, the Cataclysm Beta has opened up third-party (that's us) addon usage.

CurseForge and WowAce has added support for the 4.0 game version, and it's also recommended that in your TOC file, if your addon is compatible with 3.3, to make it look as such:

## Interface: 30300
## X-Compatible-With: 40000

If it is 4.0-only, it would properly look as such:

## Interface: 40000

The packager will pick up on this and properly assign both game versions to the generated file. If uploading (CurseForge only), then you can select more than one game version. I still recommend using the X-Compatible-With paradigm, though.

Hey beautiful people, ckknight here.

I know this is a shameless plug, but I'm gonna go for it anyway.

I'll be on two panels this year at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, GA, which is happening Sept 3-6, talking about WoW addons, so if you're around there or going to it anyway, feel free to come by.

There's gonna be a lot of fun WoW-related and general MMO-related stuff going on this year outside of the panels I'm gonna be on.

Here's the ones I'm doing:

Title: World of Warcraft - Q&A
Time: Sat 01:00 pm Location: Capitol Ballroom - Sheraton
Description: Everything you wanted to know about World of Warcraft, but were afraid to ask. (Yes, that includes information on Cataclysm)

Title: World of Warcraft - Addon Kung-Fu
Time: Sat 04:00 pm Location: Savannah 1-3 - Sheraton
Description: We'll show you which ones to use, how to use them, and why.

Update:

Well, that's all done and I'm glad to be back. Was able to meet a few people and I hope I made a good impression ;-).

As promised the system for requesting a Beta key is in place.

If you are an author on WowAce.com, order your key here.
If you are an author on CurseForge.com, order your key here.

We'll be getting keys out to people as soon as we can, and just a reminder you must be an active WoW author to receive one of these keys. We'll be manually verifying eligibility as well.

Note: if you see a message about and error when placing your order, please just try again.

UPDATE:

Quote from Kaelten's comment:

We'll be also tightening up our distribution policies.

Going forward, anyone who wants to sign up for a key must have a certain minimum threshold for the popularity of their addons in order to be approved. We'll be using the same metrics as we do for the rewards program for this, although you don't have to be signed up for the rewards program to be considered.

We are leaving it open to new users, however, by default you'll have to wait until your addon reaches the threshold of popularity before you're eligible. Also, at this point we're leaving the giveaway open to team members on addons, not just the manager.

UPDATE 7-22:

Quote from from Kaelten's comment:

I'm about to start sending out the new batch of keys. However, there is currently an issue were EU players cannot redeem them. We've been told that there is a fix coming soon. As soon as I receive word that these work for EU players I'll post another update here.

Update to the update: It turns out that at least some US players are _also_ having the issue redeeming keys. I'm going to keep handing them out though as I've been told that they should work in the near future.

Update 7-23:

Quote:

Please be aware that we are having issues with players being able to claim Cataclysm beta keys currently for all regions. We are looking into this issue and will hopefully have a better update before the end of our day today. If you have given keys out to anyone, please have them hold on to them. The keys are not the problem and it seems to be an issue within the battle.net system. We’ll let you all know once this issue is resolved.

So the keys are good, we just have to wait it out. Good thing being teased makes it all the better in the end... right?

Thanks for understanding guys, and have a good one.

Update 7-26:

Looks like the keys are working now. Enjoy the beta.

As we all know Cataclysm has entered beta. For expansions past we've been able to offer our authors beta access. I'm glad to say that thanks to Blizzard we're able to do the same again this year.

To be considered eligible for this you must have a valid active addon on either http://WoW.CurseForge.com or http://www.WowAce.com. We will be activating a new item on the rewards store (it won't cost any points!) soon that you'll need to go in and order to request a key.

We will then be fulfilling orders as quickly as we can receive keys.

Just so everyone is aware, addons are currently disabled in the latest builds of the beta and will likely remain that way for some time as the default ui gets the kinks worked out. While this will limit the toying with the API it will still let everyone test out the default one, and have fun exploring the new content.

Have fun, happy questing and testing!

As we all know Cataclysm has entered beta. For expansions past we've been able to offer our authors beta access. I'm glad to say that thanks to Blizzard we're able to do the same again this year.

To be considered eligible for this you must have a valid active addon on either http://WoW.CurseForge.com or http://www.WowAce.com. We will be activating a new item on the rewards store (it won't cost any points!) soon that you'll need to go in and order to request a key.

We will then be fulfilling orders as quickly as we can receive keys.

Just so everyone is aware, addons are currently disabled in the latest builds of the beta and will likely remain that way for some time as the default ui gets the kinks worked out. While this will limit the toying with the API it will still let everyone test out the default UI, and have fun exploring the new content.

Have fun, happy questing and testing!

I've received word that after the next set of rolling restarts, which may be happening as early as tonight, inspection requests on other players will start to be throttled.

This is being done because some addons generate a large number of inspection requests, so beware as some addons may start to behave unexpectedly, flat out break, or otherwise act up. Overall I hope it not to be too bad, but you never know, so here's the heads up.

Addon authors may need to restructure their addon so that they may _never_ receive a response back from a request. We may be seeing several second long intervals between allowed requests, and as I said, some request will likely never be answered.

If I hear any more details I'll update the post.

Updated

This morning I restarted point generation, you may not notice much difference in the points you receive right now, however things will continue to be shifting around as time continues.

Also, point generation is at this point completely up to date. If you go back and count you'll see that there is a point batch for every day in the month even if they were ran on the wrong day. In future months we'll no longer have a big delay waiting on budgeting, and we can expect the points generated to shift day to day to accommodate changes.

Finally, I think everyone will appreciate the new display in the rewards point log, It's now per-day instead of per-project-per-day. You can click on the details link and see the breakdown per project.

As usual there is always a chance that something could be off with the new code, I'll be keeping an eye on it and respond to any issues as they arise.

Have a good week,

Kaelten

Happy Friday everyone.

We all love our Curse Author Reward Points, and there's some good news. The system is being reworked, upgraded and made fancier, however that means that points will be not be generated for a few days.

When the upgrades are complete, any missing point generations will be run.

There have also been a few erroneous point generations, and once the system does restart, there may be lower points for the first little bit to make up for those point generations.

Also, authors should note that the system will be more dynamic to accurately reflect addon popularity.

Sorry for any inconvenience that this causes, but rest assured that the system will be up and running again soon.

Now there's some more good news for everyone. There have been some changes to the back end of the site to speed things up. You may have noticed the site being more responsive. That's due to quite a few back end optimizations that have been worked on over the past week or so.

Another new feature that has been released to everyone is project based forums. These were in beta for quite some time, but have now been opened up to everyone. You should be able to access them via a link in the project management section, or something like http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/projectname/forum/edit/

Take care and have a great weekend.

Hi guys,

We're going to be doing a brief server maintenance in a few moments during which the main site will be unreachable, the repositories will still be up and working.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: and we're backup, sorry for the downtime there guys :)

Today a new Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader exploit became public knowledge. It's actively being exploited, and we could all be targets.

Quote:

Adobe has announced that an exploitable flaw in Adobe Reader 9.x, Acrobat 9.x, and Flash 9.x and 10.x has been discovered and is being actively exploited. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions are all affected. The flaw allows arbitrary code execution by attackers, and hence it is deemed "critical."

Read the full article at ArsTechnica

The article linked provides some details on how to protect yourself. But in summary, there is no current fix from Adobe. Downgrading to Reader 8.x can save you there, and apparently updating to the latest 10.1 beta of flash can help, but that seems scary in it's own right.

If you don't have an authenticator already, we'd recommend getting one. Pick your flavor:

• Physical Device (US Version)
• They have an iPhone app for that.
• Available on the Android Marketplace
• Download for some US cellphones

Be safe guys.

About a week ago Curse Premium turned a year old. Our CEO sent out this email to our premium members and I wanted to share it with everyone here as there are some stats in there you may find interesting.

This is a major milestone for us, and I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for the last year. I'm also happy to announce that later this month we're going to be celebrating the 2 year anniversary of CurseForge.

Thanks again guys. Here's looking forward to another great year.

Today marks a very special day out there. It's Kaelten's birthday. Kaelten is one of the developers of CurseForge, and the administrator of WowAce. He's also the developer of the Mac Curse Client.

If you see him around today, wish him a happy birthday!

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its fifth BlizzCon® gaming convention, to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on Friday, October 22 and Saturday, October 23, 2010. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® universes.

"BlizzCon offers us a great opportunity to meet with our players and share our enthusiasm for gaming with one of the most passionate communities in the world," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We're looking forward to providing another great show filled with entertainment, competition, and the latest information about Blizzard Entertainment games."

In addition to serving as a gathering place for Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, BlizzCon will offer attendees a chance to enjoy:

• Hands-on play time with upcoming Blizzard Entertainment games
• Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers
• Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents
• Community contests with great prizes
• Commemorative merchandise based on Blizzard Entertainment's game universes
• More exciting activities and attractions to be announced

The previous BlizzCon was held in Anaheim in August 2009. Tickets to the event sold out in minutes, and some of the highlights included the announcement of World of Warcraft®: Cataclysm™, the unveiling of a new playable class in Diablo® III, the first public hands-on with the single-player campaign of StarCraft® II: Wings of Liberty™, and a closing concert featuring rock legend Ozzy Osbourne.

For more information visit Blizzcon.com!

WoW has had it's 3.3.3 patch released. Patch notes can be found here.

As this is a minor patch, the ToC remains unchanged.

If you are interested in receiving PTR interface build diff files, please send me a PM and I will get you put on the list. I will need your e-mail address to do this.

Have a great day.

This is a pretty urgent thing to report because it could damage or potentially completely ruin your video card if it's ignored. The latest NVIDIA drivers, 196.75-WHQL released on March 2nd, 2010 are causing issues with the video card fan control while playing Blizzard (and other) games. This is caused by the Automatic Fan Speed feature being broken in the latest drivers.

The games included are: World of Warcraft, StarCraft II Beta and Warcraft III. If you play any of these games (which I'm pretty sure you do if you're reading this website), you'll want to roll your drivers back to earlier versions until this is fixed, unless you want to replace a video card within the next few days.

To find out what version drivers you're using:

• Right-click on your desktop
• Click NVIDIA Control Panel
• When the Control Panel opens, in the bottom left corner there should be a "System Information" link; click this
• Your Driver version should be in the Details portion

Quote from Datth:

We're getting reports where users are getting intermittent low FPS after installing these drivers. It seems that it is related to the fan control included in these drivers not working correctly and is causing the video card to overheat on 3D applications. This will affect Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 Beta. Please uninstall the drivers and revert back to the older ones.

Windows XP: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_196.21_whql.html
Windows XP 64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_196.21_whql.html
Windows Vista/7 32-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_32bit_196.21_whql.html
Windows Vista/7 64-bit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_winvista_64bit_196.21_whql.html

More information can be found on threads such as these:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161525
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161503

Source

Going to share this news with everyone. Kody over at World of Raids has said it the best so I'm just going to repeat what he's said over there.

Anyone who has an authenticator attached to their account should run a search (and probably an antivirus scan in case it's on the threat list already) immediately and ensure the file emcor.dll does not exist on your computer. This file is one reported to be allowing hackers to access World of Warcraft accounts that have authenticators attached to them. It's also possible there are other variations of these suspicious files, so if anyone has additional information please respond in the comments.

Based on this thread, the file may be found in /users/username/appdata/Temp. Since the file is fairly new (first mentions of it are only a few days ago), and the common source is unknown, I urge everyone to not log in to World of Warcraft or the account management site until you've run a scan. Confirm your computer is secure before using your authenticator, because this DLL file is allowing hackers to crack through it and access your account.

A warning sign that you're currently infected with this keylogger is that WoW will say your authentication code is incorrect, even if you know for sure you typed in the correct code. Thanks to Cameron for posting about this in our forums, too.

There seem to be some server problems with Curse.com.

This will affect Curse.com and it also seems Curse Client downloads.

CurseForge/WowAce do not seem to be affected, so as a developer you can continue to update addons.

For end users, if you wish to download addons you can access them from the project page (http://www.wowace.com/addons/arl/ for example). Click on the files tab and you can download from there.

The people who make things work are aware of the problem, and are working on it.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update

From Adamar:

http://clientsupport.curse.com/news.aspx?id=25

Update: The network issue has been resolved, and all services should be working properly again. We apologize for the inconvenience.

A network outage at a core router in New York City is currently preventing many Curse network sites and services from functioning properly, for people in certain parts of the world. We have contacted our data center, and they are looking into the issue now.

A big deal lately with the security of wow accounts seems to be phishing. Fake whispers in-game are stating to show up nearly as much as gold advertising.

With the admitted leak of email addresses on the WarcraftRealms website earlier in December due to a security hole, you need to be more cautious as ever, as phishing email is now back on the rise. The email read:

These people will stop at nothing to get your wow details, here is a perfect example of a classic phishing email:

At first glance, this looks extremely authentic. Note that even the email originates from "blizzard.com" which goes against the in-game loading screen "tip" of trusting emails with such extensions. Infact the only give away that this is a phishing email is when you hover over the link, you can see it forwards to a non-blizzard website, an attempt to steal your account details.

I see people frequently say things like "My computer is secure". That may be fine and dandy, but did you ever stop to think about the security of websites out of your control? The truth is, you just can't guarantee this security. So here's a few tips:

• Keep your wow password unique, do NOT use the same password anywhere else.
  
• Double, even triple think about entering your login details anywhere.
  
• Buy an authenticator, you won't regret it. The peace of mind it will bring you far outweighs any downsides. Also, I know you want that cute pet.
  

Happy New Year everyone!

Things should be getting back to normal on Monday, so if you were waiting for something from us, the queue will be reviewed then.

I hope everyone had a safe and Merry Christmas, had Happy Holidays, and had a wonderful New Year.

Well, it's that time of the year again. The holidays are upon us.

On behalf of all the people that work with Curse, CurseForge and WowAce, I'd like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and hope that you have a safe and fun filled holidays.

A lot of people will be taking time off so please have a bit of patience when submitting new files/projects for approval. We'll get to them as soon as possible.

We'll see you next year!