Get userinfo from Wow server using LUA
 

Hello there,

A couple of weeks ago a good friend of mine asked me to help him with a website he wanted to set up for his world of warcraft clan.

So i started to think as of how i could create a good site for him and came to the conclusion that we needed some kind of thing like www.thottbot.com has. They monitor players who have enabled a plugin from there site and then they know exactly where they are, what level there are, what quests they did, etc...

How cool would it be to have realtime stats of every member of your clan on your site. It is also good for new applicants who might want to join the clan. Since they just have to install the plugin and then the administrators could see who he/she is and can then decide if its a good applicant or not.

Anyway, im pretty experienced in PHP and i know almost everything about HTML. So i have a programming background but the thing is how does thottbot manage to get the information form the wow servers? I read on their site that they use LUA but they need an adress of the server to get it from at least. Anyone knows how thottbot works? How they gather data from users ingame, and if its possible to use this apparently build in function for a guild site too?

Any information you might be able to give me is highly appriciated! Thank you!

Kind regards,
Sam Briels

Cosmos utilizes a patcher, which while patching, if it sees a file built by cosmos on your computer with that information (zone, quests, gear) uploads back to their servers. Thats how they do it. Basically everytime someone checks for a cosmos patch, their stuff gets updated.

This is all to the best of my knowledge.

Hey Remelio,
Thank you for your reply.

If i understand your awnser correctly it would seem that everytime i patch for a new cosmos (done it 2 times now since i started using the program about 3 months ago), it will update my stats. But that would not be very accurate since i played wow for like 3 months straight and just updated 2 times. Or do you mean that cosmos updates itself every now and then to transfer the data?

Anyway thank you for your reply. Do u by any chance know how to contact the creator of thottbot so i could ask him a couple af questions?

Best regards,
Sam Briels

I'm not sure exactly why they don't update the information as often as they get it, but thats how they get the information.. through the patcher program. I think there is a link on their patcher for contact info, so I'd check there for that.

Hope this helps.

Thottbot did, until they kind of died, update profiles and information in a batch. It queued up all the incoming responces, sorted them out ( to kill many of the duplicates ) and them proccessed them at a certain time interval. WoW Rankings works the same way.

It's most efficient when you have such a large pool of data each update. Processing everything right away would bogg the server down a lot and it would not stop duplicate stuff from constantly being process (ie; char profiles).

I would think they would queue up lets say 15 or 20 events that happened and then use those to determine changes to yoru build and then notify the web server of the changes. This could be done with xmlrpc but I have no clue what they are usign to do it, would be nice to know though :)

Here's a linky to Thottbot Profile FAQ

I personally stopped uploading to Thottbot, because I don't like how they obfusciate the data. You can see it clearly all encoded in your SavedVariables.lua file.

I also stop running any 3rd party exe for good, such as the profiler of WoW Rankings, Allakhazam, there's also another one name "wow economy" or something like that. IMHO, I don't trust exe downloaded off the Internet. Who know what spyware, or key-logger attached in it, or what not exist... :confused:

Here are the linky i have:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/Wowreader.html
http://www.wowrankings.com/