Fiote here. Here’s the full story:
I develop addons. To develop addons, since there is NO DOCUMENTATION whatsoever, you need to search and read almost the whole source code of the game searching for tips and functions that help you achieve what you want to. While you’re doing that, you might come across some functions that catches your attention. Like a function that open the game market window. If you’re like any developer I know or would ever know, the first thing you’ll do is try to call it. Surprise surprise, it works! Then you start writing down those functions. When I gathered a handful of functions like that, I decide to create a addon to help me call them with slash commands. cxAnywhere was born.
cxAnywhere is (was) a private addon. Since it do things that you’re not supposed to do, I realized I should NOT make it public. People are not supposed to be doing that, so they shouldn’t even know that can be done. And they didn’t know, until the fire nati— ops, until I mistakenly did a git add on the wrong folder and pushed it to my github repo. You don’t need to believe, and I can’t really force you to believe it, BUT THAT WAS 100% UNINTENTIONAL. Doesn’t matter what you think about ME using it. That’s not the point. It shouldn’t be made public.
As soon as I realized my mistake (unfortunately some 1~2 days later), my heart rushed in a OH-CRAP moment and I removed those addons from my repo. All cool then, right? NOPE.
No much time later someone came to my repo and opened an issue. Somethink like “oh, where is cxScanner? I can’t find it, seems you removed it”. cxScanner is another private addon, one that can scan all the market, simply automating the ‘next-page’ click and writing down all the results. With that data I can put the lowest 3 prices on the item tooltip and that helps me decide what’s really worth selling on the market without need to search for each one individually. Think Auctionner/Auctionator from WoW. Pretty the same idea (inspired by that, actually).
I replied that issue with something like “cx* addons are private and were uploaded by mistake. Sorry!” and closed it. THEN THE SHITSTORM hit. Someone lurked my commit history and found the folders (damn you git!) and start posting sh!t about it, like “OOHHH IMC WILL LOVE TO HEAR ABOUT THIS”… like they didn’t know it already, huh.
In a attempt to take it from the history, I even re-created my addon repo, but failed at understanding how the git history works, so the new repo still had the folders in the commit history and people kept forking my repo and re-releasing those cx folders. I was really pissed off, like REALLY. PISSED. OFF. because 1) yeah, of fcking course, I was afraid of being banned and 2) I know this is the internet, and I know the main thing of putting things on github is to let people copy/alter it, but it was my code that I decided to take it down but people insisted in keeping it online against my will.
We try our best to create awesome things for the community, and I take those private stuff like a little payment we get from investing so much time into the source code. It’s like our reward for improving EVERYONEs gaming life. People were bashing me SO MUCH for trying to ‘hide’ my cx addons, that I frankly said SCREW IT and release cxAnywhere, this time intentionally. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and GET OVER IT. You think I’m a hacker? Now everyone is a hacker too, weeee! (at the time of this post, cxAnywhere got 900+ downloads already in less then a day)!
I’m not pissed anymore. Neither I’m afraid. I’ll be sad if I get banned, because I really like coding addons for this game (more than playing, actually). And/or if IMC decide to ban all addons (instead of fixing their very insecure code) this will be a very very sad day for the whole player base. That’ll be the same as banning the addon devs too, because they’ll probably stop playing altogether.
Now you know my side of the story. Believe what you want to.
Peace!
Ps: cxScanner will be released soon.
