Authors CurseForge

Let me first start this post by yet again apologizing. Things are moving fast around here: a speed they've never moved before, in fact. We either didn't have the kind of clearance and approval we needed previously, or we flat out didn't have the staff.

First up, let's address the elephant in the room: mods.curse.com is gone. The old www.curseforge.com functionality has been moved to authors.curseforge.com and what used to be mods.curse.com is now www.curseforge.com. No actual functionality has changed or been removed. The Author portals remain untouched in regards to functionality and design.

This isn't a new decision or a quickly decided one. We have been chewing on how to do this for well over a year since before I started working at the company even. Mods ran on an outdated codebase, with an initial vision that never quite fit with this current team's vision for CurseForge. Moving away from it has been the culmination of years of planning and work.

It seems many people never even realized or understood the purpose of mods.curse.com to begin with. For anyone who didn't know, mods.curse.com was always intended to be the forward facing public portal. A place where end users could browse all files in release status (no betas or alphas) on the Curse network. From WoW addons, to Terraria worlds and beyond. It was never intended for Authors and CurseForge has always been the Author's side of the equation. To be clear, we're CurseForge first and mods.curse.com never felt like "us" or what we wanted. With it's tech burden, it just did not make sense to continue pouring time into it if it did not meet our expectations and values.

Authors that have been with us for a while know we have this thing called "the syncer". The syncer's duty was to take projects, releases, and such that met a certain criteria and copy it over to mods.curse.com for public consumption. Those same Authors that have been with us for a while knew that this was an old broken process that had more arms and legs than a conjoined octopus and barely worked (if at all) on many occasions.

The original developers for much of this content are no longer available and it took our current lead developer more time, energy drinks, head to desk contact and cursing to fix these issues time and time again when the real answer was to eliminate the complexity altogether. By importing mods into the current code base and infrastructure - we no longer need the syncer for projects to sync. They just... appear.

Now that's just one example in a pages long list. An issue tracker full of junk, fat in the system that we have decided to start cutting. Over the course of the last 2+ years, we have been moving to a more concise, clean, and clear development platform. We have more than 10 years of development to clean up and improve upon. It's a massive undertaking for a small team, and it's one that regardless of the difficulty we are all dedicated to achieving.

Much of the negative feedback we've received so far in regards to the new www.curseforge.com has been in the form of a few relatively simple to fix issues and we're incredibly thankful for those of you that have reached out with examples for us improve from. Before closing this post up, I want to address some of the most common comments so that you know that we hear you and what we're doing to fix them:

• Favorites - Don't worry! Your favorites still exist. If you navigate to your profile, they show up there. Additionally, we're pushing out an update right now that should be live shortly after this post goes up to assist with navigation.
• Ads - We hear you loud and clear. Just to set the record straight, ads are not planned to appear on any sites outside of the www public portal. We're working very close with the ad team here to make sure the content is suitable for CurseForge. If you see any you feel don't belong, screenshot and send it to us! cfmoderation[at]curse.com
• Donation links - Coming back, better than ever! Front end guy is on the job, and we'll get it out ASAP. Your donation link still appears on your CurseForge project page (on minecraft.curseforge.com, wow.curseforge.com, or whatever game you've released on) as well.
• General Bugs - Obviously we're getting a lot of these. We see the "beta" comments, and general complaints. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources for mass QA, A/B testing, etc required for v0 day 0 bug free releases of a massive entity that is CurseForge. That's why it's critical that if you find something, you let us know!

To reiterate the original point: we haven't replaced, removed, or changed anything about our Author portals aside from moving the original www page back to authors.curseforge.com. Many of you might not remember or know this, but that's where it lived originally some time ago.

Better late than never, now that we've explained ourselves we would like to give you a quick update on the future. We're far from done with this house cleaning effort. Next up for us is a massive (grand scale massive) update to our infrastructure. It's been a long while since we've made meaningful updates to hardware and the age of our systems are starting to show.

Over the next few weeks we will be working towards fork lifting services and parts of CurseForge out to new hardware in a new location that will allow us to serve pages, files, and dank modpacks faster than ever. We'll be doing what we can to minimize downtimes and issues, and even though this particular migration actually went incredibly smooth (aside from a complete lack of proper communication) we know that things can go sideways.

To alleviate that and to keep you guys up-to-date, myself and my team will be active on Twitter with these changes as they come down the pipeline. Make sure you're following myself @MrFlamegoat and especially the @CurseForge Twitter. Posts here don't always make it mainstream, but our Twitter is immediate visibility and up-to-date.

As always, if Twitter isn't your thing, let us know in the comments below how you feel, questions you may have, and any suggestions for the team. Honesty is always appreciated, but keep in mind that we are living breathing humans.