It's just a little idea, but how about mouse-over tooltips for additional informations?
If you hover over a player you also get the character-name and the guild in the mouse-over tooltip of that player. You could take this information into the census too.
If i remember correctly there is even an event for a tooltip change so you can just register that event and bingo, free information.
This doesn't require any /who querys and doesn't fail with names like Z?z ^^
I think this would increase accuracy of the data a bit as it may hit Players that otherwise would get lost in the Information-Gathering process...
Second Datasource
Actually you could also mine data from the target and the targets target and the targets targets target...
Or the Party and their targets...
This should help accuracy a whole lot especially on realms that have high submission rates where many different players submit their data as this data will have almost no possible holes. Some character will run accros anyone with census at some time and mouseovers happen a lot in big crowds...
Or the Party and their targets...
This should help accuracy a whole lot especially on realms that have high submission rates where many different players submit their data as this data will have almost no possible holes. Some character will run accros anyone with census at some time and mouseovers happen a lot in big crowds...
I've just had another idea somewhat tangled with this... the problem i see with census is that it will miss chars with special characters in it e.g. ?
I've seen that there is code to do a /who group divided by zones already. I've activated that and disabled splitting by names. It seems to work better than dividing by names.
I think you should do this order of query groups:
Levelranges > Level > Race > Class > Zone-Groups > Zones > Name
Zonegroups would have to be strings that are contained in more than one zone at once with as little duplicates as possible. If this fails to get under 50 chars then all Zones contained in that Group should be tested single.
In this order you should be able to get much more of the characters with special letters in the name in a census than is possible now.
I've seen that there is code to do a /who group divided by zones already. I've activated that and disabled splitting by names. It seems to work better than dividing by names.
I think you should do this order of query groups:
Levelranges > Level > Race > Class > Zone-Groups > Zones > Name
Zonegroups would have to be strings that are contained in more than one zone at once with as little duplicates as possible. If this fails to get under 50 chars then all Zones contained in that Group should be tested single.
In this order you should be able to get much more of the characters with special letters in the name in a census than is possible now.
I've often wondered if CensusPlus can record info during times other than when I've told it to crawl the /who's. I turn off the automatic function because I don't want CP crawling /who when I'm busy doing something and I might need my CPU for something important, buuut there's no reason CP can't read my guildbox any time I open it, right? Or record data of people I party/raid with, or perhaps tells, or random people in trade (I run Prat, it feeds back level-class information to me and stores non-guildie info for the rest of the playing session). Or record the random /who I might run myself.
My disclaimer is I know nothing of addon coding; I tried to learn once, and decided real quick that wasn't going to work : p. So I don't know if such a function, "passive /who recording", would eat up CPU, ram, whatever. But if passive recording could be done without a significant increase in resource consumption, I think it would be a lot more effective in the long run.
Or, if passive recording did bloat up the addon, does it help to add an ability to turn passive recording on and off from inside the game (does that even work like that?)? like "oh i'm just hanging around the AH in SW, don't really need all my cpu right now, i'll turn it on," versus, "i'm raiding and i want all my stuff, turn it off"?
My disclaimer is I know nothing of addon coding; I tried to learn once, and decided real quick that wasn't going to work : p. So I don't know if such a function, "passive /who recording", would eat up CPU, ram, whatever. But if passive recording could be done without a significant increase in resource consumption, I think it would be a lot more effective in the long run.
Or, if passive recording did bloat up the addon, does it help to add an ability to turn passive recording on and off from inside the game (does that even work like that?)? like "oh i'm just hanging around the AH in SW, don't really need all my cpu right now, i'll turn it on," versus, "i'm raiding and i want all my stuff, turn it off"?
You shouldn't notice any difference in game play when the mod is scanning. You should try it one day, when your raiding just let the mod do its stuff. I doubt you will notice 
As for the bloating. The mod does use up alot of memory. This is based on the amount of characters you see, the more you see the bigger the memory use. And turning the mod off does make the initial char selection -> loading in game screen a bit faster, once your actually in game all the other loading screens shouldn't be effected. You can reduce the amount of memory it takes by pruning often.
But if this still bothers you, then you can turn off the auto-census and just run it when you want it manually. Also Prat does capture the class info from the /who queries that Census is doing automatically in addition to the manual ones that you do.
As for the bloating. The mod does use up alot of memory. This is based on the amount of characters you see, the more you see the bigger the memory use. And turning the mod off does make the initial char selection -> loading in game screen a bit faster, once your actually in game all the other loading screens shouldn't be effected. You can reduce the amount of memory it takes by pruning often.
But if this still bothers you, then you can turn off the auto-census and just run it when you want it manually. Also Prat does capture the class info from the /who queries that Census is doing automatically in addition to the manual ones that you do.
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"the more you see the bigger the memory use."
so does that mean i should only run a census right before i'm going to log off? or does it stop using up memory when the census-taking is done? or run a census, go to an inn, log out, then log back in? and then my ram will be freed up?
so does that mean i should only run a census right before i'm going to log off? or does it stop using up memory when the census-taking is done? or run a census, go to an inn, log out, then log back in? and then my ram will be freed up?
Censusing: Mostly Bronzebeard, Aggramar, Elune; sometimes Alleria, Icecrown, Scilla, Kel'Thuzad, Mal'Ganis, Draka, Staghelm, Nathrezim, Stonemaul.
If you want it to be accurate, then you can just let it do its Census every 30mins or whatever you set yours to run automatically. If you just Census once then you won't capture as many characters as you would if it was running automatically.
Try it and see how your computer performs when its running automatically vs when its running only when you want it. You shouldn't notice anything.
Try it and see how your computer performs when its running automatically vs when its running only when you want it. You shouldn't notice anything.
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