This is the end of Ajour 😢
casperstorm opened this issue · 75 comments
This is the end of Ajour 😢
I started working on Ajour in summer 2020. The goal was simple: I wanted the easiest and fastest way to update and download all of your addons for World of Warcraft. The timing was good; Curse had just been sold to Overwolf, Shadowlands was about to be released, and Classic was popular.
I spent many hours building Ajour, and luckily @tarkah and @mlablah joined to help me early in the project. Together we created what I believe is one of the best addon managers ever. And on top of that, I made some new best friends.
In late 2020 Overwolf posted about their stance on third-party addon managers. The short version is that since Overwolf earns their money from ads and user data, they wanted the users to use their application rather than third-party addon managers. However, they weren't sure exactly what their plan was, so for the time being, they kept the API open as it always has been.
Fast forward to the present time. Overwolf now knows what they want to do. They will deprecate the current API and create a new API where downloads do not count towards the CurseForge Reward Program—essentially splitting the community by turning addon developers against third-party addon managers. In addition, they will rate limit third-party addon managers if one becomes too popular oh, and not all addons will be available over the API.
What does this mean for Ajour? Well, it kills my motivation, and it kills my vision for Ajour. I don't want to fight with Overwolf (anymore). It's not worth it. Overwolf has all the data which makes Ajour work, and currently, they are pulling the rug under us.
We had a good run, but now it's time for the team and me to pull the plug rather than obey their new rules and turn Ajour into something worse.
Thank you all for helping shape Ajour into what it is today. Users, supporters, contributors. To every one of you, thanks.
FAQ:
What happens now?
- Nothing. Feel free to use Ajour until it breaks.
What should I do?
- Ajour will work until the current API is turned off, when is unknown. The other third-party addon managers is relying on the same API but some might take the on the fight, so make sure to check them out: WowUp by @jliddev, Instawow by @layday or CurseBreaker by @AcidWeb - all good friends of mine. I hope the best for them, but the future is not bright.
The existence of this project and the great attitude of its community made me very happy from day one. It's truly sad to see it end this way, but I guess there's no alternative.
Best of luck with future projects @casperstorm.
Thank you for your work. I will miss Ajour. :/
Ajour was one of my favourite World of Warcraft community projects.
There is simply no GUI-based addon manager that is anywhere near as fast, lightweight, customisable and packed with as much features as Ajour was, and to top it all off Ajour also offered a CLI.
Thank you for all of your hard work @casperstorm, @tarkah & @mlablah and for creating something amazing and desperately needed in the WoW community, which was also completely free, open source, cross-platform and privacy-respecting.
It is sad to see the WoW addon and developer ecosystem continue to rely on a closed and single party controlled proprietary platform like Overwolf's CurseForge, and as long as it continues to be this way, it will hinder the innovation and collaboration that would otherwise come from an independent, fully open and community-controlled platform, and we will keep on losing out on truly amazing projects like this.
Sorry to hear that this will be the end for Ajour, it's the best addon manager :D Good luck with your future projects though and thanks for spending the time you did on Ajour!
What data does Overwolf monopolize? Can it be distributed and hosted elsewhere? Preferably in a distributed way that prevents it from being monopolized. Think Bittorrent or Usenet or Mastodon. Perhaps more addons will move to GitHub and GitLab.
Did not find any way to donate you for your product. Is it possible? Kind a way to say "thank you for you work".
Anyway. Thank you for fast, light/easy and user-friendly product for WoW community.
Really sorry to hear this, Ajour has been a delight to use and I'll miss it. Thanks for all of the work you've poured into this project. 🙇♂️
Thank you for your work, @casperstorm.
Maybe I'm just too small-time to give a damn, but the CurseForge Reward Program never meant anything to me. I earned a whole ~15 "points" from my most active addons on Curse, and at $0.05 per point and cashouts only available in increments of 200 points, I never saw any of my paltry sixty-five cents before my points expired (which is a disgusting feature to have in an incentive program, to boot).
Now, sure, I get that there's an entirely reasonable business case for them making this move. Curse bears the costs of hosting, transfer, etc., and without being able to sell their users' eyeballs, brains, and lives to data brokers and ad vendors, they have no business. But there have been tomes written about the abhorrent state of the ad-supported internet by wiser folks than myself.
In short, thank you, and I'm sorry, and Curse can go fuck themselves; signed, an addon author.
I am sad to hear this news.
I have used Ajour since its launch and have found it to be a very light and well-designed app.
I have also converted my family to using it exclusively.
Thanks for your work and passion in developing Ajour, it will be missed.
With the low cost of blob storage, ease of cdn access and the small avg size of addons. Coupled with the ease of sending tips and donations is it such a far fetched idea to just offer blob storage and addon devs the ability to embed their own payment link to paypal or some other crowdfunding payment processor? What's the issue with addon devs hosting it in multiple places? Is the revenue from overwolf/curseforge that significant that it can't be replaced easily?
This makes me so sad. I love Ajour. It's the fastest, easiest and hardest to screw up addon manager there ever was, making it the obvious client to recommend to anyone new to the game or activities requiring addons.
It was also the one project that finally got me active on github.
I understand them not wanting competing clients or platform to use the data they hosted, and I'm grateful for the time we were able to build upon their API.
Creators hosting their addons on github is great, but it's neither easy nor desireable to force all developers to use it, especially if they can benefit economically from it (which they abolutely deserve).
Taking on overwolf would be a giant project probably requiring monetization for creators either through ads or donations.
Ajour will be dearly missed. It's the best piece of addon management software I've ever had the pleasure to use.
@fadi-simetrik The main issue is discoverability of addons. Anyone can host something on Github/Gitlab or any other similar platform and Ajour already supports installing addons from that kind of source. Installing and keeping an addon up-to-date from this kind of channel isn't a problem. However, there are two major issues left unaddressed :
- As a player, I'd like to find an addon that does X. How do I know if there is one and if there is, where to find it?
- As an addon developper, I'd like players to use my addon. How do I reach them.
I'm deliberately keeping monetization out of the way because it's a broader issue (open-source projects in general face the same ills).
Understandable reaction from Overwolf to close the API when they get challenge by such good software like Ajour.
Gonna miss it.... :(
Thank you for the really good job you did.
And good luck for future project.
Thank you for creating what was basically the quickest and cleanest app I've ever used. I remember the first time I hit "update all" and it iterated through every addon and updated in under 2 seconds. I assumed something went wrong. I don't even load web pages that fast. Incredible work, and I am sorry it came to this.
Hey @casperstorm ,
You had so many great features man, it's a shame Overwolf is locking you out given then don't do it anywhere near as well as you did.
Some add-on creators care about money. A lot of us don't.
Just having a tool that was super easy to use, that would automatically update add-ons for people... that's all I wanted and Ajour did it perfectly.
Sorry to see how this unfolded.
Ajour is without a doubt one of the best applications on any platform I've ever used. It will also be the most missed.
I just came here to say thank you to casperstorm for all the time and expertise you've donated to this project. I can assure you it's been very much appreciated by many and I wish you luck with any future endeavours.
So CurseForge is providing a download repository, which is the expensive part which GitHub and GitLab can replace, and it also provides a "registry" of known addons so users can find them.
Proposal: Create a new GitHub project here that's simply an addon registry. Anyone can fork it to add their addon and issue a pull request to add their addon to the common registry. Savvy users could also tell Ajour to use a fork of the Ajour Registry. The registry would contain the same directory that Overwolf's API provides. Which I assume is just a list of addon names and links to their pages. All the information about their addons can be in their projects, keeping the registry lightweight.
You know, I had the same thought (sans the Ajour branding ;P)
@SpareSimian we've actually discussed this type of solution long ago. We looked at projects like Homebrew which do pretty much this.
I'd be more than happy to patch in support for this kind of backend into Ajour if a git based registry ever materialized.
This is literally what the hub does/is that you guys helped design lol
The registry linked by @layday only lists GitHub addons. That could be extended with more fields to handle CurseForge and GitLab. What does Ajour currently need to handle an addon? We could start with its requirements and consider potential enhancements. What do you do when an addon is available from more than one source? (Redundant sources are a Good Thing. Sites do go down.)
I came here to ask what it would take to make something similar as a backend, but it appears that @SpareSimian and @layday have a spark of an idea. I would love to see this kind of thing take off and I'd be happy to remove my simple little addon from anything Curse related. What else needs to happen?
@christopheml If github can replace curse as a central repo. The only part that needs implementation is an indexing layer, Which shouldn't be too difficult. A front end for developers would prob be need to point to their official repos.
seriously...
all o' ya'll bitches.
Ajour was great. This is sad news.
I'm so sorry, thank you for your work over the years. I've been a user since i started playing again with the start of shadowlands and your addon manager ticked all the boxes without all the bloat.
I was just about to search for new addons with the next patch beeing around to corner to maybe rejoin the forces, as is, this happening turned me off to that idea.
Thank you for your work, you did a great job with this project. Don't let it hold you back, the next project is right around the corner once you find an issue you feel you could fix, that itch, you know ;)
See you around!
Correction, @Lemagex , Ajour is great. Don't give up on it yet. Let's move the metadata away from CurseForge and decentralize it so no monopoly can shut it down. If we do it right, we might even see Overwolf start using it! Can we get input from other addon managers?
I like many others will really miss this.
You built the best manager I have ever used for wow.
I love the wago integration.
Very convenient and smooth.
Also love how I was able to theme it myself, truly amazing job and thank you very graciously for all your work.
Much props and all my respect goes out to you for this and your future endeavors
This is the right decision. You'd not want to entertain the cancerous ideas and vision of Overwolf.
With the transparency and open development you and your team have shown during this project, I'm sure that whatever project you end up working on, will be a success. Good luck!
Thank you so much for the work you did on this :) This is my favorite addon manager and I will keep using it until it no longer works!
Bummed to hear this. Thanks for the great addon manager. You will be missed.
Jeez...
That's really disappointing. I hope Overwolf f*****g dies in a fire.
And, I echo the sentiments of others in this thread. You've written some great software of which you ought to be proud. Thanks for your contributions to the community.
Yet another human action with a dollar sign added to it, sigh.
Edit: Ajour is awesome software you should be proud of it. Super simple and easy to use - not a given for open source!
@cmberryau The problem isn't the profit but the protectionism that prevents competition from products that we consumers prefer.
Yeah, it's hard to break in without support. There are some good comments in this thread with ideas to overcome and keep projects like this alive.
It needs an inventory of addons that can be updated and used by authors. That costs money plus a place to store release packages. Again, money. Maybe GitHub / GitLab could be used but I'll bet they shut that stuff down once it takes off.
I'll probably pull my addon from Curse on principal but that will hardly make an impact.
Overwolf is just a cancer to the gaming world at this point.
I created this account to come here.... i really hope you find a way to keep ajour alive, or pass on to someone worth of it, When i found AJOUR i was happy, it was all i ever wanted, simple, easy, worked with all my addons.... i know it's a hard fight but people making addons, if i'm not too our of my mind, do them for free, there is no reason to not create another source to host them.
you did a great job, i really hope to see you come back one day, it even manages the weak auras!!! you are amazing.
Awww man, what option is there for us poor Linux users now? :(
Awww man, what option is there for us poor Linux users now? :(
InstaWow and WowUp claim they support linux. @simonsk90
https://ogri-la.github.io/wow-addon-managers/
Really sad to read this. As someone with only a few hours a month to play WoW, Ajour made the experience of having a passable stack of mods non-agonizing. Thanks for creating it, I hope it keeps working for a while, and I really hope that mod authors somehow band together to get their metadata into some central place (surely it could be hosted on a single github pages site as a collection of JSON blobs or something? there aren't that many mods…) that isn't vulnerable to this sort of thing.
The problem is money. Would mod users pay a couple bucks a month for an index/hosting service like this to stay out from underneath the thumb of Overwolf?
Github is free and has enormous bandwidth that dwarfs Overwolf. All we need is a registry that tells Ajour (and competitors) where to find the addon (which can be Github or many other places) and how to unpack it. Along with some metadata like version, description, etc. It's really just a SMOP to switch from Curse hosting to distributed hosting.
The problem is money for the authors. Building a package registry around GitHub is not difficult. CurseForge was successful at capturing the add-on market in its entirety by splitting a portion of its income between the authors of (more) popular add-ons. Understandably, add-on authors do not want to lose this (for some of them, sole) source of income. Then there's a general scepticism about open source dating back to the WowMatrix saga and OW's fearmongering about web scraping and third-party add-on managers and whatnot; getting add-on authors onboard won't be easy. The technological aspect is minor in comparison.
I presume not all authors, correct? Is it fair to say the top few percent are the only ones making anything measurable?
I suppose even if the remaining authors could be convinced to drop Curse and just host on GitHub, it wouldn't be hard to copy/fork/whatever those back to Curse. And then everything is split anyway.
I don't want money for my addons and don't want to use Overwolf. What options are left?
I remember when Blizzard forbade addon authors from charging money for their creations. When did that change?
Interpreting donations or ad revenue sharing as "charging" is perverse.
Please continue, but drop Curse support. Ajour is so powerful, addon devs should think about rehosting on open platforms like github
Why quit, why don't we build our own open api? Why can't we court addon devs directly? This shouldn't be the end.
A sad day indeed. At the very least, Ajour serves as an excellent automated backup tool. I have a daily task scheduled to backup my Interface and WTF folders. I'd imagine this will continue to work unless Blizzard changes the folder structure again.
Thanks for the work you did on this.... I was just updating with Ajour and got a bit melancholy about it being Legacy software now. It reminded me again just how amazingly the program was written; like it has the speed/snappiness of a 100line tiny regEdit program or such, but it's clean and pretty like Apple software. As a lifetime geek stronger in hardware who can only barely patch up old broken wow addons it made me want to ask you where you learned how to code, since whatever practices you learned apparently lead to immaculate results. But in the course of looking for contact info I found your CV.... you're just a GD Savant/genius with code lol. I'd still be interested in knowing where/how you learned to code, but I think that's only a fraction of why Ajour was so good.
This has been my goto since twitch sale. I'd be perfectly ok with an ad banner on the program, and you get paid for it through the ad rev.
This has been my goto since twitch sale. I'd be perfectly ok with an ad banner on the program, and you get paid for it through the ad rev.
I don't speak for the addon author obviously, but your message to him showed up in my mail so I wanted to pitch in....
This addon dev seems like the type who would rather let their software die a dignified peaceful death rather than try to Frankenstein together something with ads and other hideous garbage just for a few bucks. Look at the person's resume, they spit out brilliant projects like this for fun from what I can tell. I switched to WoWUp as the next best resort and have hopes Wago will take over with a better site.
Truly sad. Ajour was the greatest addon manager.
I'm still hopeful we'll find a way to exploit the data in another way.
It looks like Ajour has finally passed beyond the veil for me. It no longer launches as of today.
This makes me hella sad, it's always worked wonderfully, and kept me up to date.
I have Wago for my weak auras, their horrific excuse for an addon manager doesn't have a third of my addons. I'm going to try Wowup as suggested and keep my fingers crossed.
Ajour truly was one of the best. Well done.
RIP, Ajour, until the next update.
Still loading for me version 1.3.2 and still updating for me. Hoping it stays that way for a while. I especially liked that it updated elvui too along with my addons in one click...
.Hi @casperstorm ,
Thank you so much for this application and your time developing it. It would be sad to retire this due to a corp trying to create a monopoly.
I know people have already mentioned using github as a CDN. I would be happy to invest development effort and money into creating a registry.
Perhaps you could do a kickstarter to see if enough people are willing to put money down for a service to be created? Or is the main reason you see this not working due to the OW payouts? I'm completely unaware of how much they're paying per download etc but I'm sure there are a vast amount of add-on creators out there who support open source and we could include links to patreons etc?
I'm sure there are other ways as well we could combat OW I don't think it will be easy but I'm willing to put in time and effort to help build and some funding for domains/infra/etc
Thank you for your amazing work! Sad to see it go, but it could be saved if we continue this project with WOWinterface and Elvui and hope the addon makers will move away from Overworlf
Did u talked to wowinterface if they are intrested in a client?
Today, May 1, Ajour is unable to check for updates for my Curseforge addons. It's successful with those from WoWInterface. Hopefully, this will encourage those with apps on Curseforge to move them to a more open platform.
Today, May 1, Ajour is unable to check for updates for my Curseforge addons. It's successful with those from WoWInterface. Hopefully, this will encourage those with apps on Curseforge to move them to a more open platform.
It works again now, it seems to have been on CF's end. But it's still a foretaste of how things will be when they actually fully deprecate the old API. Which seems to be "in a few days".
I wonder if we could implement some kind of torrent system? Or even blockchain. Volunteers could download a few favorite addons from Curse with the Overwolf client and then push them into such a torrent system to distribute the download cost.
Those addon authors with a package on GitHub can use this packager to build a release package for use by Ajour and other 3rd party installer/updater programs. (As seen at the AdiBags issue link above.)
So sorry to see you go -- I loved Ajour! Finally an addon manager that worked, was fast, and missed nothing.
I will try the other projects you have mentioned.
Visit your favorite addons on Curse and ask them to add the metadata to their GitHub repos so that alternative uploaders like Ajour can maintain them.
Sorry to see this. This was absolutely the greatest WoW Addon Manager I ever had. And I've been here since TBC (first one).
For your information: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/w4tmyo/how_to_handle_fork_of_unmaintained_project/ has
Did you talk to the repository owner?
I will have a chat with the owner of the org.
I'm just relaying that.
Casperstorm!!! Please tell us you got hyped by dragonflight and you are coming back...
Casperstorm!!! Please tell us you got hyped by dragonflight and you are coming back...
I am indeed hyped for the new expansion. It looks really awesome, however it doesn't change the fact that I still don't wanna fight Curse and the way they treat users and third parties.
In my world a perfect addon manager is just a GUI to that only does GitHub/GitLab addons which Ajour already does.
Tbh I think you could almost exclusively run it off GitHub/GitLab if there was some sort of package repo that curated the Addon Name to Repo Mapping (Kind of like Brew or Cocoa Pods).
Was searching around for an open source alternative to the bloated addon managers out there and found Ajour. After that I found this post. ;_;
It is really a shame, but if it's not possible anymore due to the new API, it is understandable ofc. Hoping for another project like this in the future. :)
AdiBags, an excellent bag management addon, just started releasing on GitHub using the BigWigs scripts. I can once again keep it updated with Ajour.
I love ajour, I felt sad reading your post. I'm totally with you as a fellow developer❤️ . It was the best addon manager that I used so far.
I wish there was a way to index Github repos so ajour can run without the overwolf API, have you thought about this?
I was thinking something similar to this which indexes from the github api based on topics.
Started using Ajour a few days ago, but just found this 💔
I've already had success with installing addons via GitHub, so I may try and look into ways to extend that support in ajour, if it might be open to contributions?
If not contributions, how would you feel about a potential fork or new maintainers? I realise it's GPL licensed, so I'm reading fully into that to see how it works as I normally work with MIT.
I'd love to help with a future for Ajour! ❤️
Hey, for myself I've made a fork, updated addon metadata in ajour-catalog, added WotLK support and disabled CurseForge support (temporary?).
Ajour: https://github.com/sikrinick/ajour.
Ajour-Catalog with 0.3.0 version of metadata: https://github.com/sikrinick/ajour-catalog.
Downloads: https://github.com/sikrinick/ajour/releases
Probably, I will add support for Wago.io repos, or adapt to CurseForge (WowUp does it, afaic), maybe I will add support for Github (at least links), but cannot guarantee for now.
Tested on macOS with Retail, I would be appreciated if somebody can test on Windows, especially with WotLK.
Oh nice I can test on Windows 😄 Will take a look