Curse Development

Update: New site entering beta!

2008-09-25T05:53:22Z

A couple of months ago, it was announced that Curse has been busy working on the website and client ( http://blogs.curse.com/25/details/863/ ). We’re pleased to announce that we are very close to re-launching both of these. The client has been in beta for quite a while, and we've made tremendous progress with it with your help. To download the latest version, please go to http://www.wardb.com/client.aspx.

The new Curse website is nearly complete. We will be entering beta at the end of this week, and allowing users to come test it out. For a list of what’s new, refer to the previous post. We will make a news article detailing how to test the site and other news shortly.

Coming Soon: New site and New Client

2008-07-15T23:06:22Z

Hello Everyone,

It’s been a long time since you have heard from us, so I’d like to spend some time laying out what we’ve been up to, and what you can expect to see on Curse.com over the next few weeks.

1) We’re happy to announce that we’re going to be re-launching Curse.com. We’ve decided to redo our website technology to make Curse more functional and stable. We apologize for all the troubles you have experienced in the past several months. Quite frankly, the site was not scalable to the amount of traffic we were getting. Every bug and every second of downtime upset us greatly, so we’re very excited about the new launch.

It also gives us an opportunity to release some new features and update older parts of the site. The following is a list of some major changes coming to the new Curse site:

• Forums – Our forums have undergone a metamorphosis. They will look and act like traditional forums on the internet.

• Images – Our images section has been simplified, yet still able to effectively categorize images. There interface is much cleaner as well.

• Articles – Our news and article system has also been upgraded, but not as noticeable as other sections.

• Profiles – Profiles have been upgraded significantly in the new Curse site, as well as a central part of the site in the next few months.

• Homepage – Our homepage will be changed as well. It’ll be less cluttered with random information, and instead will direct you to important parts of the network. Did you know that Arena Junkies, World of Raids, and AionSource were part of the Curse Network? You will now with the new site.

We’ll talk more about the new site within the next couple of weeks. We can’t divulge a release date at this point, but it will be sooner than you think. We’d like to thank you for coming to Curse for all of these years, and we hope that the new site will encourage you to continue to be a part of Curse.

2) We are releasing a new version of the Curse Client. We have been happy with the results of the first client, and we want to build on its success. The new version will have an all-new GUI that is much more intuitive than before. It also includes many new features. The first is an addon search within the client to assist you in quickly finding new addons. The second is a new function to share your interface with other people. This feature will tie in closely with the website, much like the screenshot tool. The rest of the new features will be disclosed as we come closer to launch.

We’ve also gone back and looked at the code to fix several bugs. A lot of issues that we were never previously able to reproduce have been identified and eliminated. Addon identification has also been improved. If you manually install addons, the client will detect them and attempt to match them against known addons. If there are many options, the client will then prompt you to pick the correct match. Lastly, it should be much more apparent when an addon needs updating.

For those of you who want a sneak peak of the new client, you can download it at:

http://www.curseforge.com/projects/cu.../51-curse-client-beta-setup-1-0-0-11

It will install in your CurseClient directory, so it will overwrite your old client. Even if you choose to install it elsewhere, you will not be able to use the old client to update addons. If you wish to revert to the old client, you will need to reinstall it. We have disabled all features except the addon manager and the news. However, both are fully functional, so please try it out and let us know what you think. Please send feedback to client@curse.com

Known issues/upcoming changes

• Layouts are not final, and will change

• There will be a more visual indication when addons needs to be updated

• The client will detect addons in your directory, and attempt to find a match. We are tweaking the match algorithm, but the results should be very good. Let us know if you find something funny with the results

Thanks for reading, and thank you for your patience. We'll keep you posted!

5 hours downtime

2008-06-29T19:55:44Z

Hi all,

We're very sorry about the 5 hours downtime; we just experienced. The problem was database related, and we've taken steps to ensure this wont happen again. Additionally, with the new website hopefully being ready for beta testing soon, it will be on brand new servers, so something like this will never happen ever again.

Again, apologizes for the downtime.

Projects not imported into CurseForge & Compilatio

2008-06-27T23:54:24Z

When we did the initial import from Curse.com to CurseForge.com we didn't include properly categorized UI Packs & Compilations.

While we are working on a new system to help handle UI Packs properly we have an interim solution of these projects being manageable via the old Curse.com admin interfaces.

We'll finish importing these projects in the upcoming weeks, but for now you can continue to manage them on Curse.com.

"We're back!"

2008-05-03T01:53:13Z

Hey everyone,

We've experienced a couple of issues with Curse.com in the past few days. Anything from the site being down to logins being disabled. We've been working very hard on coming up with a fix to these problems as soon as we noticed them. Said problems should now be gone and logins are enabled again.

We're aware of all the issues Curse.com has had since Patch 2.4 and this is why we have a whole new development team working on re-writing everything from scratch. We're VERY excited about this and it's our intention to provide you with a new Curse that is lightning fast without any speedbumps as you've most likely encountered before. The new Curse is also going to be more light-weight. It'll still retain the design you're used to -- it's just going to be faster, sexier, more pleasant and filled with more features.

As soon we have more information to share about the new Curse, we will post about it right away. Stay tuned.

Our apologizes for the site issues, they will be a distant memory soon.

Internal Server Error 500

2008-04-16T13:05:25Z

Hi all,

Our developers have worked hard to resolve the dreaded "Internal Server Error 500" problems you might have experienced when attempting to upload files to our media server.

We're happy to announce that this has been resolved. We continue to monitor the media server to prevent this from happening again.

Clarification: This is regarding our website. Not the client.

Please update your client to the new version we recently released. See the following news:

Curse Client Version Update

Patch 2.4 Portal

2008-03-25T23:08:42Z

While we've already announced this in our news section, I wanted to take the time to post a little blog entry about it as well. This will also make sure that with the news frenzy sure to come over the next few days, that this won't get lost in the madness of it all.

For those of you who haven't seen the announcement yet, I'll go ahead and quote it here:

In anticipation of tomorrow's World of Warcraft patch, we've updated patch.curse.com to reflect all of the latest content for 2.4. On the Patch 2.4 Portal you can find not only the latest compatible AddOns, but also much more; full coverage of all 2.4-related content, including instance walkthroughs, Shattered Sun Offensive and Daily Quest guides, and a general overview of the Isle of Quel'Danas.

Here's just a sampling of what you can find on the Patch 2.4 Portal!

2.4 Compatible AddOns
The 2.4 Compendium
Daily Quest Guide -- just in time for the increase in maximum daily quests per day!
Isle of Quel'Danas Overview
Magisters' Terrace Walkthrough
Sunwell Plateau Overview
The Battle for Sun's Reach -- find out about Patch 2.4's World Event!
Shattered Sun Offensive Guide
Patch Notes
Beginner's Download Guide
And much more!

To get started checking out this latest patch portal's content, head over to patch.curse.com!

I also wanted to take a moment to thank the entire team at Curse -- especially those working on content; we began planning the 2.4 portal in mid-January, and luckily we've added some very talented people to the content team at Curse over the past two months, which has made preparing the immense amount of content coverage for 2.4 much easier. Zyuu, Enob and Qupe have all done a fantastic job on the content they've created for the 2.4 portal and the patch in general. We also worked closely with Teza from World of Raids, so that we could gather feedback and ensure the information we were providing was accurate, as well as useful to each and every World of Warcraft player.

I didn't realize initially the sheer scope and magnitude of the content going into this patch from Blizzard's end, but after spending well over a month working on the coverage for that content, it's easy to see that this is, without a doubt, the largest content-based patch in the history of the game thus far (sans The Burning Crusade, of course). It was a lot of fun working on the patch portal this time around, and I (as well as the entire team) hope that what we've created for it will be useful to the community here at Curse.com. We definitely won't be stopping here, though -- be sure to keep checking back. We've got a lot of cool stuff in the works and of course, the Wrath of the Lich King portal will be the best thing since... well... Ok, I won't say it -- it's too cliché -- but you get the idea!

Further Site improvements & Site Down Time

2008-03-22T11:06:38Z

Hi guys, just wanting to give a little bit of a heads up of what our goals are over the next few days and whats been going on.

The Past few Days

As some of you may have noticed over the last several days we've considerably improved response time from our servers via optimizing page render times for a few key pages. There have been a few small bugs in relationship to these optimizations, however all known bugs caused by these changes have been fixed. But please report any abnormal behavior you see or experience!

As many of you noticed we had a unscheduled maintenance yesterday when our main database server suffered a disk failure. Luckily no data was lost as our disk array did preserve the data integrity.

This will continue.

The next few days

Why are we doing this? We want to remain fast and stable during 2.4's patch day, and we are committed to brining more optimizations and fixes to the table over the next few days. In this spirit I'll next be working over the download details page and the download page itself before tuesday, Just in case Tuesday be the day.

I've recently been made aware of a few bugs in the project administration related to language selecting for localizations. We also plan on having these fixed shortly.

Please stick with us guys. We're striving to make this our best patch day ever!

In closing, I hope that has been an informative first blog post from me. I hope to continue making more and more of these as we continue to work on more features and continue making this site fast and more useful.

I have only one request guys, Give us feedback. We'll read it(or at least I will) and I'll do what I can to make sure they're addressed as possible. Of course I can't promise any particular results, but I can promise one thing, if there is a problem with the site, be it a bug or a design problem, it won't get fixed if no one tells us.

Later and Peace, Kaelten

Site optimizations

2008-03-19T13:46:11Z

Earlier today our coders pushed live many optimizations to Curse.com. Basically what this means is that you should find Curse.com a lot more responsive (i.e faster!).

We will continue to improve Curse and we have many things planned for the future. Thank you everyone for your continued support!

Curse Quest 2008

2008-03-06T02:21:46Z

With the Curse offices located in San Francisco, we had a very unique opportunity during the Game Developers Conference last month, and we set a goal of making sure everyone not from the town enjoyed their visit.

With that in mind, in early January we began planning the Curse Quest -- an evening of entertainment, drinks, food, and a time to kick back and relax after a hard first day of GDC.

We picked out the Fluid Ultra Lounge as our place to host what would turn out to be the most eventful and fun party of the night -- and one of the best of GDC. We were also lucky to bring in the incredibly talented local duo HardNox for the evening, and they did a superb job entertaining the party guests.

Here are a few images from the party; hopefully we can do this again next year, as it was a great time had by all who attended!

Now the question: Who is up for this next year?! Share your thoughts in the comments -- we'd love to hear ideas for future themes; this one mostly focused on Curse as it stands now, and what we have coming up in the near future.

Bug fixes and even more bug fixes

2008-02-19T02:59:56Z

Hey everyone,

The last week Curse.com have had several issues with anything from image uploading to images not displaying and video uploading, problems with downloading files and several other problems including issues with news not displaying correctly and also videos sometimes not streaming.

Our developers have been actively working on fixing all the problems with the site since they were first discovered and they feel that most problems have been resolved.

Summary:

Image uploading should now work correctly
Media uploading should now work correctly
Viewing images when logged out now works
Downloading files should work a lot better now, no really, it does!
You should be able to download files via the Curse Client
If you previously experienced problems with streaming videos -- it should now work
Video uploading should now work correctly (for real this time)

If you discover anything that still might be broken or not function as intended, please let us know.

File Widgets Launch

2008-02-02T01:21:34Z

We have launched one of the many upcoming widgets, the file widget. It will allow you to embed (in Curse Wiki posts or on your own websites) a small widget giving you information about your project including the latest version and the number of downloads.

You will be able to grab the widget by clicking the share button on the left of a project's details page.

RSS and More

2008-01-30T07:43:22Z

We have pushed live an update to the site tonight which included a few key things:

A few fixes for account activation.
Several fixes for account login.
Updated news RSS feeds (check the subscribe links on portals, they're now site specific again).
Some other minor fixes.

Downloads and Login Revamp

2008-01-26T11:36:40Z

You've probably noticed that we've been rolling out some new (and somewhat annoying) changes over the last couple of days. I'd like to let you know that we've finally ironed out what we think are the last issues :)

That being said, I'd like to present to you the new authentication system, and the new download pages.

The authentication system was revamped over the last few weeks in order to allow us to share accounts over several "network" websites. We have an upcoming WoW database site for example, which will allow you to login using your Curse.com account and password.

We have also revamped a few of the pieces of the download section:

You will see brand new details and version download pages with a much enhanced look bringing them closer in line with the rest of the new design.
We have improved the "lightbox"-esque effects when viewing screenshots and similar tasks.
There is now code to share a file tooltip (via JavaScript) on an external website by clicking the "share" button on a files detail page.
We have enhanced the tooltip mechanism to be much more robust and have removed the on-demand (ajax) tooltips.
The RSS feeds have been cleaned up and you can now view access them for only a specific site (such as World of Warcraft)
All of the pages which list the top 100 X have been cleaned up. Examples are the New Downloads, Top Rated Downloads, etc.
We have added a new "Recommended Downloads" feature. This will show you what other users also liked based on their usage of files.
We have added the "Other X" box which will show you other popular files within the category of the file.
There is now a button to "install via curse client" right on the files detail page.
The list of downloads is now powered by our javascript library and will make it so there is much less scrolling, but still easy to see all versions of a file.

Free to Play Portal and More!

2008-01-10T08:00:59Z

We are glad to now offer our Free to Play portal on Curse. On it you will find news, images, videos, downloads, and forums for all of your favorite free MMOs. You can also browse and rate released games as well as see upcoming ones.

There are now new skins on the Starcraft 2 portal as well as the Tabula Rasa portal.