Hey Authors!
We will be performing site-wide maintenance on Wednesday the 17th of May between 11am PDT (6pm UTC/GMT) and 1pm PDT (8pm UTC/GMT).
During this time the site will be put into read-only mode while maintenance is underway. Any services that require data to be pushed to CurseForge will be unavailable.
Although the window is for 2 hours, we are hoping that it will be less.
We apologize for the relatively short notice.
Greetings Authors! This is CurseForge Comms for May 5th, 2017!
We have quite a few things for you guys this week, but before we get started I wanted to introduce you to one of our new moderators, Technostar98!
Many of you may have noticed his name popping up either approving or denying your projects and files. He just started this week, and I’m sure you guys will be seeing a lot of him around the communities.
With this new addition to our team, moderation will now have 24 hour coverage for all addons and mods, aside from Bukkit which requires special training. Store order audit times remain unchanged. This new moderation schedule starts May 14th, 2017!
Just as a refresher for Store Orders and Bukkit plugins: moderation times are Mon-Sun, 8am - 11:59pm Pacific. Anytime there is going to be exceptionally long moderation/audit times, we do our best to notify everyone via our Twitter @CurseForge.
With introductions and refreshers out of the way, let’s get onto this week’s changelog!
As a final note, our developers will be out of town starting next Monday and won’t be back in until the following week. We still have availability for emergency bug fixes, but will be short on feature updates until they return.
That’s the roundup for this week, as always if you have any ideas or suggestions, drop them down below.
Signed,
Your friendly neighborhood MrFlamegoat
Greetings Authors! This is CurseForge Comms for April 26th, 2017.
First up - sorry for being late! Between illness, a summit that we shipped our devs off to, and my own workload we missed our last Friday deadline for this post.
Our devs were out for the majority the week after our last post at an internal summit to discuss changes and features revolving around our core platform. There is a lot of good that came from those discussions, and plans are in place that should allow us a faster turn around on features and fixes due to less development overhead dedicated to maintenance, and more dedicated to productive development.
Obviously, we can’t divulge too much about that process, but as any of those plans come to fruition, we will be sure to put that information right here in these posts.
Okay, so down to business. We may be late but we are still committed to making sure we keep you guys up-to-date on the week to week over here, so let’s get to it.
A couple of those security related changes are vague due to their sensitive nature, but we want you to know that we work to secure aspects of our platform (preferably) long before an issue arises. That’s the case here.
Wait, why was the download button removed on Modpacks?
There has been a recent uprise in questions (i.e. tons of support tickets) regarding how to use modpacks from users who have stumbled onto CurseForge, downloaded the modpack manifest, and have no knowledge of how to import and launch it. This of course has led to questions from authors due to download counts appearing “high” for modpacks while the mods in them maintain much lower download counts than expected. Removing the download button from forward facing locations is an attempt to help reconcile this issue.
As an example, 25% of Darkosto’s new Invasion pack downloads during its first month were generated from users incorrectly downloading the pack from the site and not knowing how to use it. The download button can still be accessed on the file information page, but that is now the only location to download modpacks on the site if needed.
Additional files (server packs, etc) will continue to have their normal download buttons as well as being better surfaced in a soon to be released update. The download button will refer to our Knowledge Base articles for downloading and importing modpacks (see those here).
Alright, that’s the fix and feature round-up since the last communications, but before we go we have a few more things we would like to discuss about the coming weeks.
Many of you will be happy to hear that we have officially moved from the discussion stage to the planning/action stage regarding community features for CurseForge!
While we don’t want to risk over promising and under delivering, we have taken a very serious look at a few key features we feel would be integral in community interaction and community building. As soon as we have the approval on specifics, we will be sure to post right here as they are added to the roadmap. These are features that we feel are essential to our current communities, but would also enrich other future communities as well.
Lastly, please know that if any issues you are concerned about have yet to be addressed, you can rest assured that we are willing to listen.
Thanks for reading!
Your friendly neighborhood MrFlamegoat
Greetings and salutations, Authors!
As many of you may have noticed recently, many things have been changing in the last 6 months for Curse. We know there are plenty of questions, concerns, and issues that have been brought to our attention.
The team has been wanting to develop a more clear communication pipeline between our development team and the communities for quite some time. Due to lack of resources and staff, this hasn’t been something we have had any way of effectively carrying out. Not to mention, many things we were working on we just could not discuss for logistical and business reasons.
Which brings me straight to the point of this article...
Starting today, and continuing semi-monthly (maybe more!), we’ll be putting together a post consolidating all of the changes, fixes, features, etc that we’ve completed or are working on. Some weeks will have a lot of things, some weeks won’t. Either way, we’re going to do what we can to communicate with you the things we feel you would want to know.
This won’t always just be a changelog, but will also include information about events we’re attending, places we’re going to be, cool things we want to share with you guys and in general a more open and honest window into the week to week here at CurseForge.
This first round up is very WoW heavy - but we’re doing our best to balance out the work so future updates will be a bit more diverse! So without further ado, here’s a list of the most recent fixes!
Fixed and released:
Eventually, we hope the fix list is relatively short. Not because we will ever stop fixing bugs, but because we hope we don’t create them faster than we fix them! But these posts aren’t just about what we’ve done, it’s also about what we’re doing. In addition to these fixes, we also have updates that will be going live in next week's release:
Things in QA (Fixes coming soon!)
Lastly, I want to talk a little about the future of CurseForge. I know with all of the changes there are quite a few concerns about Author Rewards, CurseForge as a business, the state of individual communities, and much much more.
First and foremost, the team here at CurseForge is 100% committed to CurseForge. In fact, we’ve organized ourselves as a proper division within the company, and as a team we have chosen to double down on our core ideals, motivations, and passion for what these sites are. In the last several weeks, as we’ve met and planned, I’ve seen renewed passion and excitement from the entire team.
We’re not going anywhere!
As for other concerns, there will be further announcements and info regarding most if not all of the major points in the coming weeks. We will be absolutely sure to let you know right here, from this point forward, any time there is important news regarding CurseForge.
Wow! This is a long one, but I wanted to make sure I was clear and thorough. Now, what I need from you guys is feedback. Give us whatever you’ve got down below. The only thing I ask is that you keep it constructive. Many of you who have come across me in forums and comment threads know that I’m happy to take constructive criticism, even if it’s harsh - but rude, non constructive, or disrespectful comments are still not appropriate and may be removed.
Keep it clear for real issues, comments, and discussion so that we can easily pick those up, track them, and get them into our tracker.
That vast majority of those who I’ve spoken to, even the most outspoken of the communities, are driven by passion. That’s something that no matter how harsh it comes across, we will take with open arms.
Thanks for reading!
Your friendly neighborhood MrFlamegoat
Hello Authors!
Today we’re happy to announce the ability to merge your Twitch account with Curse! As many of you know, and some of you don’t know, Curse was acquired by Twitch in late August of 2016.
Since then we have been working diligently behind the scenes to integrate Twitch services and offerings into our ecosystem, as well as ours into theirs. This is the next step in that process.
Unifying the login process is the first step in allowing us to offload much of the development load back to home base and move our resources more to just working on the individual experiences of each community.
In addition to this, it means that there is now a much narrower entry point helping to prevent spambot creation.
Okay, fluff is out of the way. Let’s get down to business!
What’s happening to my CurseForge account?
Nothing! This only changes how you authenticate with our services. We’re just adding the ability for you to login with your Twitch credentials! That’s it.
A few things to note:
Once you’ve merged your accounts, you will from that point forward log into CurseForge with your Twitch credentials.
Although merging is currently optional, this will change in the future as we move to simplify and secure the authentication process.
Cool. Now HOW do I merge my account?
That’s the easy part! The next time you go to login, you will have the option to either login with your Curse credentials, or your Twitch account. You can easily create a Twitch account if you do not have one currently. After creating/logging in with Twitch and authorizing Curse access to your Twitch account, you will be asked to enter your Curse credentials.
Poof! Connected. From this point forward, you should login in to CurseForge with your Twitch account. It’s that simple.
During this process, you may be given the option to update your Display Name. Please note that this does not affect your username, which will become your Twitch username, but only affects the name people see which works the same as it always has.
Ew! Twitch?! What is that, I don’t like it, I don’t watch live streams, etc etc etc!
No worries! It’s optional for the time being. Furthermore, once you create your Twitch account, you aren’t required to go there unless you want to. (Editor’s Note: As a streamer, I’m biased. I personally love the place).
This move’s primary goal is to consolidate our resources into a central location. We have hundreds of thousands of users coming in and out of CurseForge, and not utilizing the resources available to us would be silly.
Help! Something has gone horribly, terribly wrong!
Got Twitter? @CurseForge - we’ll be watching it around the clock.
Got E-Mail? cfmoderation[at]curse.com
Got Internet? https://support.curse.com - submit a ticket, this goes to the whole team!
Hello there guys and gals!
As I'm sure you've noticed, the migrations and updates we mentioned last week have been completed! Now, I know that this is quite a large change, and that there are items missing (I will address that in a moment) but on the plus side, things should be a little quicker, a little more organized and a lot easier to navigate from a project stand point. Take some time to navigate around and familiarize yourself. We have some general documentation on Project Creation here: https://www.curseforge.com/knowledge-base
Our primary goal with this migration, aside from getting the essentials completed before the holidays, was to get SC2Mapster on the latest codebase so that as the new year begins we can start properly addressing concerns, bugs, issues, etc from all of our communities without having to dredge through old code, out of date standards and a monumental amount of overhead.
That being said, some things didn't make it in the upgrade process. We're still evaluating some of the missing features and quite honestly, that's where you guys come into play. I've set up a Forum Thread over here.
Bottom line is, we want to be active and we want good solid communication. Try and keep it constructive - the good and the bad - but be honest and clear. We can handle it, and we want you guys to know we're listening.
If you have something that just can't wait, or a bug/site issue - please reach out to us on Twitter @CurseForge or ping me personally @MrFlamegoat. If you find something that's not mission critical, and you would just like us to know, we're always available at cfmoderation[at]curse.com - which reaches all of the core Community Team.
Feel free to leave a comment on this post, or head on over to the forums for a more in depth discussion. We'll be watching them all, and I'll do my best to respond to any critical concerns as will the other team members as we can.
Aside from that, I hope everyone has a great holiday if that's your thing, and if not - try and have a great week anyways.
Your Friendly Community Helper,
MrFlamegoat
Hey all!
Just wanted to give you guys a notice beforehand about upcoming updates, upgrades, and migrations.
As we’ve been doing with all of our legacy sites, we’re moving over to our latest and greatest project backend and forum software which once complete, gives us much better visibility over operations and allows our staff to more easily keep an eye on things. As well as providing a code base we have much more control over to stay on top of bugs, issues, features, etc.
Most of our communities are rather small and have been more or less quick migrations with downtime generally remaining within the several hours range.
However, due to SC2Mapsters long history and robust forums, the forum downtime could be as long as several days. Our hope is to keep this as minimal as possible, but because of this extended downtime we wanted to make sure we let you guys know before ripping the cord out.
We’re doing our best to make the transition as smooth as possible, but will be here with open ears waiting for suggestions, ideas and constructive criticism along the way.
I want to clarify that this will not affect the migration of the base SC2Mapsters CurseForge site, as that migration should only take several hours to complete - as with our many previous migrations. Only the forums will need the additional downtime to import due to their size.
The migration is scheduled to begin within the next few business days (likely early next week). After it is complete, we will be posting updates along the way on our Twitter @CurseForge and if you guys have any questions feel free to reach out to me via PM here before migration, or @MrFlamegoat on Twitter anytime during the migration or after. We will have an additional post welcoming the new community into the updated and improved family of sites.
Wow, I know that was a lot of talking and fluff, but I do want to stress that we’re doing what we can to communicate better with our various communities. So please don’t be afraid to reach out to myself or the other Community Staff members!
Your Friendly Community Helper,
MrFlamegoat