Curse-gaming – Two months later
Two months ago Curse-gaming made a huge site resdesign. One that I was not too happy about for a number of reasons. Now, it might have been a bit unfair for me to make that assessment when I did, as curse had just released the update. naturally there was a bunch of bugs to work out as no testing phase catches all of them, and I pounced at a bad time for them. Well, in the past two months Curse has fixed most of the bugs, and I'm back to using the site as a distribution vector for my addon.
My main concern before was the lack of stability. This redesign came at a time when I was very active in my development of Profession Helper and I couldn't afford to spend hours each day trying to login and upload new downloads. At the time their site couldn't stay up for more than five minutes, and I'd frequently see stack traces from Django. This continued for a week or two, before getting better uptime. Now the site seems to be up 24/7 (as far as my logging in is concerned) and I haven't seen it crash in at least a month. More importantly, I can login and upload changes to my addon, as well as post to the comments for it, without fear of the download being lost, or having to type my message four times.
Secondary to all that, I took real issue with the new design. Its not as intuitive as the old one was, with me having to click through many pages before getting to what I want / need. This, unfortunately, hasn't really been fixed because, well, its not seen as a problem. For instance, to view Profession Helper, I have to either:
- Click the WoW portal, then search for Profession helper, then click on the link.
- Login, click on my account, click on addons, click on profession helper, exit the "edit project" area, and get back to the normal area.
- (My shortcut) Favorite my addon once, then I can login, click on favorites, and click on Profession Helper.
To give you an idea of how annoying that is before I could: Login, mouse over "Addons" and click Profession Helper. As my login is saved, this amounts to loading the site, and clicking Profession Helper... one click, no page loads in between.
In addition to the non-intuitiveness of the site layout, there's still issues with the ads. On the header they show various ads. Some of them float down over the user buttons (login, mail, etc). While they've gotten MUCH better (it used to be very ad floated to there, and now its about one in five) this is still an issue at large.
One thing I will say is the admin staff at Curse handled these issues well. From my understanding they put in a lot of overtime fixing the issues that cropped up, and it wasn't a result of lack of testing so much, as some bad failures that happened at a very, very bad time. I can't find the news article relating to this (as their forum search is a bit weird) but I recall seeing something about the downtime being from bad load-balencing? Also, apparently they didn't have enough users step forward to beta test for them.
EDIT: Found the article: Its on their forums here.
I was also quite impressed that one of their devs, David Cramer, took the time to comment on my previous rant, encouraging me to come back. I'll say I always liked Curse-gaming, and it was out of a sense of hurt that a brand I frequently recommended would put out such buggy software that I made that post. The fact that they'd take the time to reach out to one user is great public relations, and I applaud him for making that gesture. Now, whether that was out of a fear I might reach too many people (I hit the top of google searches for some curse-gaming searches, BEFORE their site) with bad news, I'll never know, but it meant a lot.
So, to summarize, while there's still bugs (which all software has) and some layout issues, the site is stable, and able to be used by its community once again. If I had to grade it, it'd probably get a B+, as I very, very rarely give any code an A, meaning its completely bug free and completely user-friendly.
