Re: Yasueh's Macros and Addons for F2P
When you log in with a character running the addon, that character's name is added to a list in the addon's settings database for that realm (the settings for the addon being account wide. Each realm has a separate list). The addon broadcasts that list to everyone in the channel when you log in (it's listed in the change log under 1.2.2), and also sends it to individuals when they log in after you, in response their data packet. The original use was to increase the number of valid candidates when the addon was passing channel ownership when the current owner logs out, and in the past it was actually doing that. I stripped the code out because it was an overly complicated mess, but I'd like to have the same functionality again in future.
These lists of alts have been stored in the addon's settings since shortly after it started using a database, and were readable to anyone using a text editor on the file. Something I've had to consider is that people could modify the addon to do things it shouldn't. One of those things is broadcasting a list of alts that contains characters other than your own, claiming them to be your alts when they aren't.
For that reason the new info module
doesn't just give the list of alts that's stored in the database next to a character name, but instead checks the the names in that list, to see if the active character's name appears in their alts list too. Basically when a character claims another character as an alt, that character also has to claim the first character as an alt for the addon to consider it to be genuine connection, and show it in the tooltip (or pass ownership to the level 1 alt of someone who has a level 20 F2P, over a level 1 who's waiting to get channel ownership in order to set a password).
The tooltip's purpose is to help work out who everyone is, because unlike endgame where most people play only a couple of characters, the ease of making F2Ps means that most people have a lot of them, and it's very hard to work out who the hell everyone is most of the time.
The number of malicious uses people could have for that information is small, pretty much limited to stalking, which can almost completely be countered by ignore and report (I can't remember if an ignore on one character applies to the rest of the characters on your account by default, but there are addons that will friend/ignore account wide for you).
Meanwhile the number of beneficial uses to which the addon can put the information is pretty big. For example, off the top of my head:
- I could improve the addon so it would work with invite only channels. You can stick a password on a channel, but not give it out, then invite people to it without them learning the password. The problem would be the owner/mods would have to invite people back to the channel when they swap characters or log back in later (after the channel has closed, lost it's member list, and been reformed because everyone logged out of it), but with a list of alts the addon can handle that.
- The addon could generate the text to make a web page or post into a forum, containing links to all the armories of all the F2Ps at 20 (that one almost made it into 1.2.12).
- If I ever got round to making an arena wargame queueing system, people could queue any of their characters, while playing on any other character, and they'd get a popup to say when enough people had queued to form teams, and even say which of the queued alts to log onto, if people wanted to restrict the queue system to using specific comps.
- It could also be used for a mini F2P only census, a bit like you can find on warcraftrealms.com, so people can see the popularity of specs, races, classes, etc.
What I will do is add a line to the .toc file for the addon, so it isn't automatically enabled for every character you have, just because it's installed. That way people can restrict the list of alts shown to the characters they're happy to have in channel, and not get characters accidentally added to the list because they logged that character in without first disabling the addon for it. It may be a while before that gets released though, because in order to save people having to regularly reinstall their addon, I prefer to only do releases when I've got several new features, or something major needs fixing.
For the moment if you want to reset the list of alts your addon is giving out, once you've decided which characters are included by having the addon enabled on only them, you can use the following slash commands from any one character that is running the addon, and it'll affect all the characters for that realm on the account (if you play on more than one realm using the addon, you'd need to run it on each realm):
Code:
/run F2PAddon_Variables.Alts[F2PAddonGlobalVars.thisRealm] = {}
/reloadui
That will wipe the list, re-add the active character as the UI and addons reload, and send out an alts list containing just that name, overwriting the entry for the character in the database of everyone in channel at that point, and everyone else's databases the next time they see you in the channel.
In future I'd like to have the database act more like a cache, so it will be wiping character data when the characters haven't been seen online for a while.