So I spent last night playing with add-on updaters.

I fired up WoWMatrix (against my better judgement) and I will never use it again, whether it works or not. One of the ads it popped up was for a Registry Cleaner. 50% of the ads for registry cleaners are for either malware or scareware (convince you that you have a problem without actually doing anything, then tell you they'll fix it if you'll just give them a little money). I didn't click the link because I didn't care. There's a damned good chance that they don't care what they advertise. This bothers me. Not because they're making money off add-on creators (WoWMatrix has infrastructure costs, I don't begrudge anyone trying to recoup their costs), but because they'll align themselves with questionable advertisers. No WoWMatrix for me.

Next I tried the Curse downloader. I first had issues setting up an account. Once I was done there, and once I figured out which file to download (I went directly from the links on files.wowace.com which directed me to CurseForge -- don't do that), I couldn't convince it to authenticate. It also did some weird things like make some questionable system calls. No Curse downloader for me.

Next was the WoWInterface updater. Got it up and running. It's Java, so nice and portable. Got it to login to my freshly created WoWInterface account, then went to update. I had to go through each of my 150 addons and tell it the WoWInterface ID for each one. I gave up after five. No WoWInterface updater for me.

"Fuck it" I said and made a copy of my addons folder. I then deleted -all- of my old ones, then started manually download the new ones. This was kinda nice as I was able to get rid of some I didn't need. I also made sure that all my addons were known to be Wrath (3.0.2) compatible. It's certainly not elegant, and I'm missing a few of the Cartographer herbalism maps, but I should be set with what I have saved.

I'm once again without an updater. Sucks. But, I have reduced the number of addons. Yay.

(Oh, and I didn't even get to login to any of my toons before it was already well past midnight.)

I will have to look at it again. I didn't see any adds on Wowmatrix. All I did was install it, it detected all my addons, I hit updated all and then closed it out.

I think he's referring to the teeny tiny links at the top of the WoWMatrix window.

I guess ignorance is bliss cause I'm living in a happy, constantly updated world :P

Yeah, the top of the WoWMatrix window has four little hyperlinked ads.

If it works for you, great. :) Just doesn't work for me. What really came out of my little experiment is that WoWMatrix is the best option out there in terms of actually doing what it's supposed to do.