I'll start out by saying that I update addons from WoWInterface wherever possible, and heave a sigh of resigned frustration at each addon whose author is too lazy to do anything more than tag revisions on CurseForge and completely ignore the standard release process. Here are just some of the many reasons I feel this way:

#1 -  You have removed the ability for users to be notified in any way when an addon marked as a favorite is updated. This is undoubtedly an attempt to force more people to use the Curse Client. However, the Client doesn't come anywhere close to meeting my needs when it comes to updating, so I don't use it. Instead, I have to manually check my favorites page once or twice a week to see if anything has been updated since the last time I checked. This is a waste of time for no good reason. Notification has been available in the past, originally in the form of email notification (which I prefer) and more recently in the form of an RSS feed (which I dislike). Now, notification has been removed entirely. Why?

#2 - Curse has now introduced additional complexity to the favorites page. What was wrong with showing me all of my favorites on one page? Now it's broken down into multiple pages, each showing a mere 20 items. One of the reasons I don't use the Curse Client is that it has no support whatsoever for standalone libraries. While I have almost 80 projects marked as favorites on Curse, over half of those are libraries (and probably closer to two-thirds). Dividing this list into pages just means that I have to click through yet more page loads to find a particular addon when its author sees the light and posts it on WoWInterface, or when I need to find the download page for usage information. (One example of this is ItemRack: it has tons of features that are accessed by performing modified clicks on certain frames, and since I don't need to use these features very often, when I do need to use them I have to go look up the specific frame and modifier to access them.) The only real reason I can think of to split up the list is that making users click through more pages means that you get more ad impressions. This is a horrible reason to drastically reduce the usability of your site. If concerns about database server load were a factor, you could easily have provided a "View All" link; the majority of users would probably only care about the most recently updated addons, while those who want to see the whole list wouldn't have to waste time waiting for more pages to load.

#3 - The addon author profile page is nearly useless. Most people, when they view an addon author's profile, are interested in the list of addons that author has released. I doubt many people care about the author's "activity log" or the author's "blogs". This is not MySpace. Again, showing just a few of the author's addons per page just wastes time and annoys users by forcing them to click through multiple page loads.

#4a - The entire site is extremely difficult to read. I have very poor visual acuity, and significant astigmatism on top of that. The tiny, tiny text sizes you seem to think look so great everywhere mean that I have to zoom in to have any hope of reading anything. 150% is about the minimum size that is comfortably readable for me, though I generally use the site at 170%-200% depending on how tired I am and how long I'm using the site.

#4b - The blindingly bright white or light gray background with dark gray text provides very poor contrast, further decreasing readability, and increasing eyestrain at any zoom level. I am in fact typing this post in an external text editor, because looking at the bright background long enough to type this post would surely give me a headache.

#5 - Major site functions are unusable without CSS enabled. Frankly, I usually just disable CSS on pages that are as unreadably styled as Curse, and browse in plain text. However, you apparently didn't consider that anyone might want to use your site without CSS, because some critical functions are simply not accessible without it. For example, the "Download" link on addon pages is marked up in HTML as a single non-breaking space; the visible image is applied as a background in CSS. By contrast, the "install via curse client" link, which is directly adjacent to the "Download" link, is marked up as an image. This means that when CSS is disabled, the "Download" link is invisible, while the "install via curse client" link remains visible. The "Download the Curse Client" link, which is marked up as text in HTML, is styled via CSS to appear as a small icon. It seems very odd that you have three adjacent links which are all designed to be displayed as images, and they are all marked up in completely different ways. The most accessible one is the "Download the Curse Client" link; I'd recommend you switch the others to the same markup (text link, transformed into an image with CSS).

#6 - Needless scrolling makes addon pages needlessly annoying. Vertical scrolling should be reserved for the page as a whole (browser scroll bar) or for special elements like text input boxes. There's no reason to take a section of the page -- such as the addon description -- and wrap it in a horizontally scrolling DIV. This is bad for many reasons. Firstly, it's annoying to users who are scrolling a page with the mousewheel, only to suddenly have the cursor enter the DIV region and stop scrolling the page as expected. Secondly, because the DIV region is taller than the visible area of the screen even when the browser is maximized (at least at 1680x1050 resolution), the user must shift focus from the page's content to navigating the nested scroll bars.

#7 - Download link does not behave as expected. Each addon page has both a "Download" link and an "install via curse client" link. Clicking on the "Download" link should download the addon directly. However, it instead directs the user to a page that again requires the user to choose between downloading the addon or installing it via the Curse Client. Why is the user asked to confirm this choice? This is unnecessarily tedious, and is rather condescending. I've already chosen to not use the Curse Client and not click the "install via curse client" link on the main page. Do you really think that if you ask me again I might change my mind?

This list is far from complete, but this is all the time I feel like spending on detailing issues that will likely be ignored anyway. Over the years the Curse site has only gone downhill from both a usability perspective and an accessiblity perspective. It's gone from being the only site I used to keep my addons up to date and find new addons, to being the last resort for updating addons only if they aren't available on any other site, and a site I never look at for new addons. I'd like to think that the Curse team simply isn't aware of these issues (which is bad enough), but I fear the reality is more that Curse has now become a corporate entity focused entirely on profit margins, and that that spending time to make the website more usable, especially for the minority with visual or motor impairments significant enough to present obstacles to "normal" web usage, falls outside of this focus.

Thanks for the feedback.  I'll try to clarify where possible, but keep in mind I'm not a developer on the site so I can't speak from a coder's perspective.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#1 -  You have removed the ability for users to be notified in any way when an addon marked as a favorite is updated. This is undoubtedly an attempt to force more people to use the Curse Client. However, the Client doesn't come anywhere close to meeting my needs when it comes to updating, so I don't use it. Instead, I have to manually check my favorites page once or twice a week to see if anything has been updated since the last time I checked. This is a waste of time for no good reason. Notification has been available in the past, originally in the form of email notification (which I prefer) and more recently in the form of an RSS feed (which I dislike). Now, notification has been removed entirely. Why?

This has nothing to do with forcing people to use the Curse Client.  We had issues with email providers blacklisting us due to the frequency of emails sent out during 3.0's release, so we had to disable email notifications on favorites.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#2 - Curse has now introduced additional complexity to the favorites page. What was wrong with showing me all of my favorites on one page? Now it's broken down into multiple pages, each showing a mere 20 items. One of the reasons I don't use the Curse Client is that it has no support whatsoever for standalone libraries. While I have almost 80 projects marked as favorites on Curse, over half of those are libraries (and probably closer to two-thirds). Dividing this list into pages just means that I have to click through yet more page loads to find a particular addon when its author sees the light and posts it on WoWInterface, or when I need to find the download page for usage information. (One example of this is ItemRack: it has tons of features that are accessed by performing modified clicks on certain frames, and since I don't need to use these features very often, when I do need to use them I have to go look up the specific frame and modifier to access them.) The only real reason I can think of to split up the list is that making users click through more pages means that you get more ad impressions. This is a horrible reason to drastically reduce the usability of your site. If concerns about database server load were a factor, you could easily have provided a "View All" link; the majority of users would probably only care about the most recently updated addons, while those who want to see the whole list wouldn't have to waste time waiting for more pages to load.

I can agree with this.  I'll add it as a feature request to display all favorites on a single page, as well as the ability to increase the number displayed on a single page.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#3 - The addon author profile page is nearly useless. Most people, when they view an addon author's profile, are interested in the list of addons that author has released. I doubt many people care about the author's "activity log" or the author's "blogs". This is not MySpace. Again, showing just a few of the author's addons per page just wastes time and annoys users by forcing them to click through multiple page loads.

Yep.  We have profile improvements coming.  Suffice to say we weren't quite finished with profiles but had to release the new site due to 3.0.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#4a - The entire site is extremely difficult to read. I have very poor visual acuity, and significant astigmatism on top of that. The tiny, tiny text sizes you seem to think look so great everywhere mean that I have to zoom in to have any hope of reading anything. 150% is about the minimum size that is comfortably readable for me, though I generally use the site at 170%-200% depending on how tired I am and how long I'm using the site.

I can't really comment on text size.  It's similar to other websites, so I'm guessing we follow a standard for default text size.  If you have examples of sites that do not follow the standard, and are offering similar services, please let us know.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#4b - The blindingly bright white or light gray background with dark gray text provides very poor contrast, further decreasing readability, and increasing eyestrain at any zoom level. I am in fact typing this post in an external text editor, because looking at the bright background long enough to type this post would surely give me a headache.

I agree that the font color and background color are very uncomfortable to read for long periods of time.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#5 - Major site functions are unusable without CSS enabled. Frankly, I usually just disable CSS on pages that are as unreadably styled as Curse, and browse in plain text. However, you apparently didn't consider that anyone might want to use your site without CSS, because some critical functions are simply not accessible without it. For example, the "Download" link on addon pages is marked up in HTML as a single non-breaking space; the visible image is applied as a background in CSS. By contrast, the "install via curse client" link, which is directly adjacent to the "Download" link, is marked up as an image. This means that when CSS is disabled, the "Download" link is invisible, while the "install via curse client" link remains visible. The "Download the Curse Client" link, which is marked up as text in HTML, is styled via CSS to appear as a small icon. It seems very odd that you have three adjacent links which are all designed to be displayed as images, and they are all marked up in completely different ways. The most accessible one is the "Download the Curse Client" link; I'd recommend you switch the others to the same markup (text link, transformed into an image with CSS).

I can agree with this, it does seem odd.  I'll point our frontend developer to this post to shed some light on the reasoning behind it.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#6 - Needless scrolling makes addon pages needlessly annoying. Vertical scrolling should be reserved for the page as a whole (browser scroll bar) or for special elements like text input boxes. There's no reason to take a section of the page -- such as the addon description -- and wrap it in a horizontally scrolling DIV. This is bad for many reasons. Firstly, it's annoying to users who are scrolling a page with the mousewheel, only to suddenly have the cursor enter the DIV region and stop scrolling the page as expected. Secondly, because the DIV region is taller than the visible area of the screen even when the browser is maximized (at least at 1680x1050 resolution), the user must shift focus from the page's content to navigating the nested scroll bars.

This will likely not be changing.  It's a fixed length due to scrolling concerns in the old design.  Take a look at QuestHelper's description for all the reason, basically.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#7 - Download link does not behave as expected. Each addon page has both a "Download" link and an "install via curse client" link. Clicking on the "Download" link should download the addon directly. However, it instead directs the user to a page that again requires the user to choose between downloading the addon or installing it via the Curse Client. Why is the user asked to confirm this choice? This is unnecessarily tedious, and is rather condescending. I've already chosen to not use the Curse Client and not click the "install via curse client" link on the main page. Do you really think that if you ask me again I might change my mind?

This is a legacy functionality from the old Curse website, where multiple media server options were available for download.  This page has since been modified to contain other content, including the changelog for that specific file you're downloading.  Can the page be removed entirely?  Can it be improved to offer something valuable for having to read it?  Maybe.  We'll have to review it and see what we can do with it to make it a useful destination.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

This list is far from complete, but this is all the time I feel like spending on detailing issues that will likely be ignored anyway. Over the years the Curse site has only gone downhill from both a usability perspective and an accessiblity perspective. It's gone from being the only site I used to keep my addons up to date and find new addons, to being the last resort for updating addons only if they aren't available on any other site, and a site I never look at for new addons. I'd like to think that the Curse team simply isn't aware of these issues (which is bad enough), but I fear the reality is more that Curse has now become a corporate entity focused entirely on profit margins, and that that spending time to make the website more usable, especially for the minority with visual or motor impairments significant enough to present obstacles to "normal" web usage, falls outside of this focus.

Frankly, this is what typically causes things to be "ignored".  We always read feedback but there are sometimes reasons we don't respond to it immediately.  It's unfortunate you think Curse has become a corporate entity only focused on profit.  We have to make money to support this website; 3.0 alone for the week after the patch was more bandwidth costs than many people make in a single year.  But no one cares about that, right?

At any rate, no, your post isn't going to be ignored.  We take website feedback to heart and will always take any usability suggestions into consideration.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kody

This has nothing to do with forcing people to use the Curse Client.  We had issues with email providers blacklisting us due to the frequency of emails sent out during 3.0's release, so we had to disable email notifications on favorites.

That sounds like a flaw in the Curse system that allowed so many messages to be sent so frequently. I sometimes get a dozen messages a day from WoWInterface, but that shouldn't be enough to trigger blacklisting?

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kody

I can't really comment on text size.  It's similar to other websites, so I'm guessing we follow a standard for default text size.  If you have examples of sites that do not follow the standard, and are offering similar services, please let us know.

I'm not currently at home, but when I get there, I'll take some screenshots of Curse.com and place them side-by-side with screenshots of other WoW-related websites to illustrate the size difference.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kody

This will likely not be changing.  It's a fixed length due to scrolling concerns in the old design.  Take a look at QuestHelper's description for all the reason, basically.

Addons like QuestHelper are exactly where the fixed-height scrolling subdivision are the most annoying. If I need to find something in the addon's description, I have to first scroll the whole page down so that most of the subdivision is visible, and then scroll through that separately. If the information I need is at the end of the description, I then have to scroll the main page down again so that the bottom of the subdivision is visible. It would be far less annoying if it fit all on one screen so that the multiple scrolling weren't necessary, but like I said, in a maximized browser window at 1680x1050 resolution, it does not fit on one screen. Here at work at 1280x1040 at 100% zoom (original size) the subregion just barely fits on one screen, and fine-tuned manual adjustment of the main scrollbar is required to get the whole thing on the screen.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kody

 

This is a legacy functionality from the old Curse website, where multiple media server options were available for download.  This page has since been modified to contain other content, including the changelog for that specific file you're downloading.  Can the page be removed entirely?  Can it be improved to offer something valuable for having to read it?  Maybe.  We'll have to review it and see what we can do with it to make it a useful destination.

I would mind less having the page load with the changelog, if it also automatically started the file download. However, most users who care what's in the changelog can already view that before downloading that by selecting the "Changes" tab on the addon's main page.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Kody

Frankly, this is what typically causes things to be "ignored".  We always read feedback but there are sometimes reasons we don't respond to it immediately.  It's unfortunate you think Curse has become a corporate entity only focused on profit.  We have to make money to support this website; 3.0 alone for the week after the patch was more bandwidth costs than many people make in a single year.  But no one cares about that, right?

At any rate, no, your post isn't going to be ignored.  We take website feedback to heart and will always take any usability suggestions into consideration.

I understand that the website has to make money. I have no objections to showing ad banners, asking for premium subscriptions, and other standard revenue-generating tactics. However, over the years the website has consistently gotten progressively less considerate of visual impairments, less functional when standard accessibility features like increasing zoom level or disabling CSS are used, and more needlessly complicated in general. I've provided feedback, but I've never seen a single change in the website that seemed to reflect any of it, and things have only gotten worse.

The advent of CurseForge has also greatly degraded the addon uploading and updating features as well, but that's another story entirely, and one I've already given a great deal of feedback on, feedback which has been personally responded to by the people directly empowered to make the kind of changes I've suggested, and none of which has been implemented in any form. I'm not just saying my feedback will be ignored because I think it will get more attention. I'm saying it because 100% of my past experiences with Curse websites have reinforced this belief. I'd love to be proven wrong, but those past experiences do not bode well for the future.

Thanks for the feedback.  Let me respond to some of your concerns:

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#1 -  You have removed the ability for users to be notified in any way when an addon marked as a favorite is updated. This is undoubtedly an attempt to force more people to use the Curse Client. However, the Client doesn't come anywhere close to meeting my needs when it comes to updating, so I don't use it. Instead, I have to manually check my favorites page once or twice a week to see if anything has been updated since the last time I checked. This is a waste of time for no good reason. Notification has been available in the past, originally in the form of email notification (which I prefer) and more recently in the form of an RSS feed (which I dislike). Now, notification has been removed entirely. Why?

This change has nothing to do with the Curse Client.  It is disabled, as Kody mentioned because of the volume of emails sent out.  While in some cases this causes blacklisting, alot of users have complained as well.  You seem to be fine with getting a dozen emails about updated addons, but some users are not, and were very vocal.

The good news, is that a rewrite of this system is almost complete, and addon email notification and visual clues will make their way back to the site soon after the Thanksgiving holiday.  This system will send updates in a digest form that should be more palatable for both users and email servers.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#2 - Curse has now introduced additional complexity to the favorites page. What was wrong with showing me all of my favorites on one page? Now it's broken down into multiple pages, each showing a mere 20 items. One of the reasons I don't use the Curse Client is that it has no support whatsoever for standalone libraries. While I have almost 80 projects marked as favorites on Curse, over half of those are libraries (and probably closer to two-thirds). Dividing this list into pages just means that I have to click through yet more page loads to find a particular addon when its author sees the light and posts it on WoWInterface, or when I need to find the download page for usage information. (One example of this is ItemRack: it has tons of features that are accessed by performing modified clicks on certain frames, and since I don't need to use these features very often, when I do need to use them I have to go look up the specific frame and modifier to access them.) The only real reason I can think of to split up the list is that making users click through more pages means that you get more ad impressions. This is a horrible reason to drastically reduce the usability of your site. If concerns about database server load were a factor, you could easily have provided a "View All" link; the majority of users would probably only care about the most recently updated addons, while those who want to see the whole list wouldn't have to waste time waiting for more pages to load.

This is likely an oversite given the design of the page.  The favorites section has plenty of room to expand downward, but the default page size in our UI framework is always 20.  I'll expand this to something more reasonable, but I probably wont let it go unbounded.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#3 - The addon author profile page is nearly useless. Most people, when they view an addon author's profile, are interested in the list of addons that author has released. I doubt many people care about the author's "activity log" or the author's "blogs". This is not MySpace. Again, showing just a few of the author's addons per page just wastes time and annoys users by forcing them to click through multiple page loads.

I think you're probably on the mark here.  We'll think more about the role of the profile page for authors.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Phanx

#7 - Download link does not behave as expected. Each addon page has both a "Download" link and an "install via curse client" link. Clicking on the "Download" link should download the addon directly. However, it instead directs the user to a page that again requires the user to choose between downloading the addon or installing it via the Curse Client. Why is the user asked to confirm this choice? This is unnecessarily tedious, and is rather condescending. I've already chosen to not use the Curse Client and not click the "install via curse client" link on the main page. Do you really think that if you ask me again I might change my mind?

This is indeed a throwback to the old curse site, the design of which I copied in the new incarnation, and I agree that without mirrors to choose from this page serves little purpose for most users.  I'll see if I can change the way the flow works.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Prodigal

This change has nothing to do with the Curse Client.  It is disabled, as Kody mentioned because of the volume of emails sent out.  While in some cases this causes blacklisting, alot of users have complained as well.  You seem to be fine with getting a dozen emails about updated addons, but some users are not, and were very vocal.

The good news, is that a rewrite of this system is almost complete, and addon email notification and visual clues will make their way back to the site soon after the Thanksgiving holiday.  This system will send updates in a digest form that should be more palatable for both users and email servers.

That is good news, although I'd say that if users are unhappy with the volume of update notification, they should disable update notification, or use fewer addons, or switch to a better email client.

Also, as an unrelated addition to the list of complaints, this WYSYWYG posting input form is terrible. Selecting is very buggy, especially when trying to select multiple paragraphs, as when quoting portions of a post. Deletion is even more buggy, tending to move the cursor to the beginning of the input field. "Raw HTML" mode isn't really a user-friendly solution, especially since it seems to only use HTML for paragraphs, and BBCode for everything else?