Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

So, a while back I mentioned I make a World of Warcraft addon, Profession Helper. This used (well, still is until the site lets me delete it) to be hosted on Curse-Gaming. Well... here's why I wanna delete it.

Curse-gaming used to have an amazing site.

1. It was clean, fonts and colors and every fit together.
2. It was easy to use, one could find whatever they needed in very few clicks. Very few.
3. It was stable, I never had one error using it for 8 months.
4. It was fast, (I know archive.org isn't, please believe me) since there wasn't that much media, the pages loaded almost instantly
5. It just plain worked.

However, they recently "redesigned it" for "four months". And take a look at what they came up with.

1. It's ugly, things stick way out, fonts and colors don't seem to work. Also the design is busted, and the ads drift over crucial buttons that means I have to bookmark every page I want.
2. It's hard to use, even with a "tour" they have it now takes me a bunch of clicks to get to the only thing I care about, my project.
3. It's very unstable, I've had it throw errors on every part of the admining of my addon. Everything. Also logging in is about 50% when I give the right credentials.
4. Slow... slow... slow... Too many ads spoils the page. It takes forever to load any page, even small things like private message box.
5. Oh, and they deleted all private messages with no warning. I had my plans for the addon stored in there (stupidly) assuming they'd make backups since (at the time) it appeared to be a legitimate site.

Now, I'm no full time developer, but I think a few things should be obvious here.

1. You never release busted code. If its gonna error, you fix it on an internal test server. I can understand some things getting by this, but I'm on a "support" browser and have gotten upwards of 100 errors in the past 24 hours. Besides the errors, there's parts of the code that just don't work. The "Favorite" count, for instance, as well as download count, and anything that's counting users doing things.
2. You make backups. There's no reason they should wipe everyone's mailboxes, you should transfer that mail into the new database, if there is one.
3. Always do user testing. What seems obvious to the developer is usually far from to the user. As evidenced here, they've got a ton of users saying they can't find their way around, causing at least one to leave (me).
4. Make sure you're not selling a bad product. Those ads that I assume support the site, actually break it. Break meaning 5 seconds to load on a cable line... Break meaning overlap legit portions of site. Break meaning there's more ads than content. It becomes obvious these guys are about the money, NOT having a good addond repository.

So, due to all of the above I'm hosting Profession Helper from my own website. This means I'm gonna lose users, as its not on major sites anymore, but I'm hoping word of mouth will get things out there. I've got my own forums set up for support, and hopefully will see them get used. If you're here because you use / want to use Profession Helper, please see that page I linked above. As always, get the word out! Perhaps if enough people complain, Curse will go back to their old design.