WoW is plagued with add-ons, some of them good, some of them just outright silly. I personally use three or four add-ons. I try to keep it to a minimum as I've experienced many issues, especially around the time of a patch, anything from extremely poor game performance, to constant errors popping up.
The other major issue from add-ons is how to get them ... safely. There is a marketing war on out there about how add-ons should be supplied to customers. wowmatrix is an add-on tool that automatically scans your add-ons, checks their versions and downloads the latest one directly for you. Sites that were providing the downloads got upset with this and started blocking wowmatrix, forcing customers to go to their site.
Now, I wouldn't have a problem with going to sites of other add-ons, if it wasn't for the risk of key-loggers. If I had one gold for every time I heard reports about cursed.com, a popular add-on supplier, having key-loggers on their site, I'd be gold-capped. There are all sorts of warnings popping up on blogs even today, about not going there and advice about how to get around the key-loggers. I'm not too sure whether it's the site itself that has the key-loggers or is it the advertising banners? Unlike a lot of other sites they don't have the security of Google advertising but a lot of their advertising does look legit. But you seriously cannot ignore all the reports.
I still try and use wowmatrix where ever possible. Unfortunately there are one or two add-ons which are blocked.
Should it be the responsibility of the game manufacturer to provide a secure path for add-ons to be downloaded to the community? Blizzard can take any one of these add-ons at any time and turn it into something that is built into their game. In-game calendar for instance was around for a long time before Blizzard implemented it. Needless to say, I would highly advise keeping your add-ons to a minimum and I would also advise extreme caution, no matter where you're downloading your add-ons from.
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