Well, that's unfortunate. It seems you really want the mod to be purposely belligerent & annoying for the express purpose of social engineering poor mod new users who may not update as often as you like. Note that spamming update notifications ingame in no way means that those people will actually go and update.

1 & 2) If that 59 bytes sent every half hour is actually true, its still 354 bytes every 4 hour raid session. Which is more than 0. Don't you think?

4) What does not apply here? From the link I provided earlier:

"If you raided back in the days when threat meters required everyone to run them, or in a guild where everyone was supposed to have CTRA, oRA2, and/or a specific boss mod and the raid leader ran version checks all the time, you probably remember what a gigantic pain in the ass it was, and how much time was wasted trying to get every single person running the exact same version."

and

"The only things you need addon communication to track are cooldown reductions from glyphs (because there is no API for finding out which glyphs someone else is using) and the targets of casting spells (because there is no API for finding out the target of a spell being cast by someone else, until after the cast finishes and the spell actually affects the target)."

most certainly apply here.

- - "Doing this version check does have an importance because Decursive is very popular..."

Well, the same thing can be said about boss & threat mods brought up in the Phanx quotes above.

- - "The problem here is that WoW add-ons don't have access to anything but the game so the only way to have a working version check is that every user announce his version for others to listen."

No actually, its not a problem. Other ways: through the Curse Client or doing it manually outside of WoW. Its as even though other people may already regularly update, you still want the mod to be belligerent and annoying and spam others all the time. For those people, it provides nothing but annoyance. And the actual benefit to those who don't update is questionable, as noted in the quotes above.

5) "Well here is the trick you're not getting: it's thank to the 1/4th of people keeping their mod up to date that others will know that a new version is available. So if those people were not announcing their version it would defeat the whole purpose of this system."

The trick here you aren't getting: whether its as little as 1/4 or (more realistically) 1/2 or more of the users updating outside of WoW, those people get no benefit whatsoever from either broadcasting or receiving version check spam inside WoW. Such mod behavior actually has negatives, as mentioned. So no, if they have options to disable the broadcasting and receiving, it would not "defeat the whole purpose of this system".

The only thing such options would potentially defeat - - besides belligerent mod behavior - - is the low percentage situation of someone having the most updated version annoying someone without the most updated version.

As well, what about those people who are using StopAddonMessage or similar and blocking the checking? Is that not also "defeating the system"?

- - Finally, this isn't a petition to completely get rid of the version checking. Only a request to add manual options for informed users to be able to manually disable both the broadcasting and receiving.

The fact of the matter is that currently the mod is designed to be annoying and belligerent to the large percentage of users who in no way benefit and in fact get disadvantaged (annoying alerts, etc.) from version checking. Whether any users gain net benefit from version checking at all is another matter (brought up above).

Is social engineering poor mod new users by forcefully broadcasting version updates all the time really worth the annoyance to informed users who can't turn that off? Note again that spamming version updates ingame does not automatically mean that those people will actually go and update.

So hopefully a way to manually disable the broadcasts can be provided.

Reasons:

1) Increased bandwidth used. People on limited bandwidth will reach their caps sooner. Those paying for every byte will have to pay more.

2) Due to 1), also greater potential for other Decursive users to get disconnected from the game randomly. As happens with excessive use of the addon comm channel when receiving messages from someone using the same mod(s) you are. Which certainly decreases the user experience.

3) Not especially relevant perhaps, but despite earlier issues, I have still been using and recommending this mod to others for dispelling debuffs. And have been for years.

But if there isn't an option to disable this version spamming, I'll move on to something like Healbot or SmartDebuff and stop recommending Decursive to guildies, among others. Can't recommend people to necessarily use something like StopAddonMessage to prevent belligerent spamming by a mod...that in other respects is great.

4) Phanx's well-reasoned argument for why mods don't need to be doing version checks or most other inter-mod comm.

5) Many people may not want to have a mod doing something they really don't need to have done - - being informed randomly there are updates and/or using up bandwidth pushing out version announces. Due to them keeping consistently up to date on their own either manually, through the Curse Client or otherwise.

If there are average to advanced users doing that, what point is there to continue to spam version announces for those people? Why can't those people turn it off if they choose to?

Its pretty much a "this mod is worse than my nagging parent/friend/wife/husband"-syndrome when you provide a feature that can have negative effects on gameplay, can be annoying and useless for many users and can't be turned off if a user so chooses.

------

Thus the ability to give people an option to manually disable the version announces/checking is far from useless.

Heck, have it turned on by default. For those who never update mods, which I assume is the point of providing this feature, it can potentially be useful.

But I haven't yet heard why providing an option for people to manually disable version announcing/checking if they want to is a bad thing. In fact for those who don't want it/need it, having such an option in fact increases the betterment of the user experience.

In the new alpha: "Decursive will now announce its version every 30 minutes when zoning (on PLAYER_ENTERING_WORLD). No other mod I know of arbitrarily spams the addon channel with its own version announces.

Whether version checking and/or announce spamming for a mod is really necessary or not is one issue (it isn't). But will you be providing an ingame option to completely disable this new version announcing/checking if someone prefers not to use it?