Site and addon status: patch 9.0

[Balgair]

For those who haven't seen my non-announcement posts of a few weeks back, Bringoutyourdead, who was the sole active maintainer for the site and addon, has stepped back from the site, due to the difficulties Blizzard's changes have caused the addon, and the scale of changes that would need to be made to the database to make it function with the level squish. I can only thank him for the huge amount of effort he's put in over the years to keep Rollie's concept alive and well for so long, for many years after he stopped playing WoW.

Obviously this means with prepatch today (tomorrow in EU), it's most likely the end for new data: the addon did not work for me on beta, and I expect it will not work when the patch goes live. Even if it does work, the level squish will mean all characters which existed before 9.0 will not receive updates, due to being lower level than previously. Plus there was already an issue with some newly-connected realms appearing to be the wrong region, which won't help data integrity at all.

The site itself should continue to function with the old data, so at least character histories will continue to exist for as long as Metalbeast leaves the hosting in place - although, the domain name is due for renewal in November and I don't know who was responsible for it, so it's not guaranteed that access will continue. Probably worth backing up any character histories you want to keep!

Big thanks to Rollie, Bringoutyourdead and Metalbeast for all they've done to keep the site running for almost 16 years, it's been a great place

[Poisonenvy]

Sad but not unexpected. It's a pity we couldn't just have two databases .. a static "before" and a new one starting from scratch. But .. as the addon doesn't work any longer anyway ...

Thank you everyone for all your work to keep things running - it would be really nice to at least have the database remain accessible, as it's been very useful, for me at least, tracking guild histories for potential new members.

[Balgair]

Unfortunately a 2nd database would also be a heck of a lot of work, I don't think BOYD had sufficient access to do that and Metalbeast rarely had time to do anything to the site. The best hope I had was a working addon for personal use, but as expected, when I tried it just now I just got a big pile of error messages.

I suppose we'd been in decline for a long time anyway; Blizzard's restrictions meant we lost many of our (not that many) remaining contributors last year, so it's not so many of us affected by it now. See http://www.warcraftrealms.com/topcontributors.php for demonstration, if you look at the 10th place each month for about the last year, they're low enough that you can guess there were no more then 11-12 people uploading per month - only 4 people have uploaded any data this month.

It'd been many years since we had enough data to be a lot of use for overall population counts, but the character histories were unique, and it's a shame we can't continue those - I do hope the old data will remain up for the forseeable future, but it's not in the control of anyone active here, just have to hope for the best.

[Poisonenvy]

Indeed .. I believe I have been the only one uploading for my realm for many years - but then, honestly, that's primarly the data I looked back on anyway. The overall realm data has been interesting, simply to check on the activity of other realms, but from a personal point of view, especially once Blizzard changed the way things worked, I had major problems having time collecting data on other realms than my own.

Regarding the current census addon, and the problems with the current patch in WoW, however - I don't believe all the issues may be due to the addon. I have been unable to get any reliable or sometimes, any, results using /who anyway .. and other people have said the same. We ask people who want an alt invited into our guild to /who our guild and whisper someone .. that has not been working.

[_Finnegan_]

I guess I'm a little bit late to the party, but I managed to get the add-on to work again. (Some things aren't okay but scanning works well for me).

I only invested an hour of work so far. So I would say that the add-on part is fixable.

If you could find a way to get the database working ( i.e. an update script to recalculate all levels) things could go on...

[Poisonenvy]

How did you get it working .. last time I tried, there was just nothing .. it just didn't seem to activate ...

[kulakai]

I'm a software developer. I could spend some time looking at updating the database or possibly just putting it in a stable archive state. Let me know if I can help.

[_Finnegan_]

I just made some changes - one for the backdrop that nearly broke all adding and then some for the level squish.

On most chars this works well - on others it starts at 40... but it shows that it can be resurrected!

If someone wants to take over or just look here is the zip: https://www.file-upload.net/download-14 ... s.zip.html

[Balgair]

Thanks Finnegan, I've downloaded it, will try it out tomorrow (it's late here) and see how it goes. Just having the addon for personal use would be great! I've also passed Kulakai's details to BOYD regarding the site, although how much can be done there is currently unknown; thanks for the offer in any case