We have some sad news to report from the World of Warcraft addon community as Jon “Sylvanaar” Akhtar, the creator of popular addons like Prat, Addon Control Panel, and WoW Instant Messenger, has passed away.
Akhtar’s catalogue of addons have seen nearly 50 million downloads in total on Curseforge, with many of them focusing on either chat improvements or addon management for players and other addon devs alike. Akhtar was also a principle developer of mobile applications and an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin.
As for what happens to the legacy of addons Akhtar created, there’s no word on whether they’ll be maintained going forward, though there are a number of contributors reportedly offering to keep these tools alive, while others are maintained due to their open source nature. In either case, we wish to offer condolences to Akhtar’s family and friends and thank him for his ingenuity in making WoW’s chat functions just a little bit better.
