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:

1. Click the WoW portal, then search for Profession helper, then click on the link.
2. Login, click on my account, click on addons, click on profession helper, exit the "edit project" area, and get back to the normal area.
3. (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.

First off it seems more Germans use my addon than Americans (or at least, English speakers). I note this because checking the logs of referrals to my site, more people come from the German section of Curse-gaming than the English one.

Also, I can tell what guilds are using my addon. You may think that's absurd, but its quite easy. The good guilds (from my standpoint) are one who link to the developers site from a downloads page. I've found a few that don't in fact link back to me, but most do. So, once a guild lists my addon, I'll get about 5-10 hits over a few days from that guild's downloads section. Really cool, actually.

Just started working again on that bug that really killed my production a few weeks ago. Lets hope I can solve 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.

I have to say Blizzard makes it really ease to mod WoW, since every addon is just a LUA file, and an XML file. In fact, that's all that their UI is also, so you can modify that as well. Looks like this should be a fun little month or two of addiction before I find another love.