[Phanx]

re: WAU and updating addons

WAU is actually abandoned and unsupported. Personally I use JWowUpdater, which is actively developed and supported by its creator. You can find it in the Updaters forum on wowace.com, or by Googling "jwowupdater"; the actual program is hosted on code.google.com. It also supports updating addons from wowinterface, wowui/incgamers, curse, googlecode, and maybe more.

Always update all addons at once. If you use standalone libraries, make sure you disable your updater's "update even if only libs have changed" option. The way wowace.com's files script works is like this:

Addon is updated to revision 12345. New zip is created, entitled Addon-r12345.zip. Library used by Addon is updated; new zip for Addon is created, entitled Addon-r12345.1.zip. This generally causes a great deal of confusion, with people asking "why doesn't addon X work this patch? I downloaded an update 5 minutes ago!" when in fact the addon hasn't actually been modified in 6 months, and what the user is downloading is the 73rd repack of the same addon files with new library files. (Which BTW is what you're seeing with Parrot; more on that in a minute.)

re: Reappearing buff frames

If you have more than one addon that can hide the Blizzard buff frames, try turning off the hide option in all but the one you actually use to display buffs. For example, I have PitBull and SatrinaBuffFrames installed, but I told PitBull to not hide the Blizzard buff frame; since I use SBF to show my buffs, I let it handle the Blizzard buff frame. It shouldn't really make a difference, but if you're seeing it reappear, it's probably due to addons fighting about who gets to touch the buff frame.

re: Portrait bugs in PitBull

This is a known bug in PitBull, but is low priority and unlikely to be fixed any time soon, as there are more important bugs/features for its developers to spend their time on.

re: Parrot

Parrot has not been updated to work with WoW 2.4's new combat log system yet. What you downloaded was not actually an update to Parrot, but instead a repack of its zip file for an update to its embedded libraries.

Before 2.4, Parrot detected damage, healing, and similar data by parsing the strings in the combat log. If your combat log said "Your Fireball hits Murloc for 50 fire damage", the parsing engine used by Parrot would break that up to determine that the source of the action was You, the target of the action was Murloc, the ability used was Fireball, the result was a hit, the action dealt damage in the amount of 50, and the action's school was fire. Patch 2.4 changed this system so that the server no longer sends this preformatted string to your WoW client, and thus Parrot isn't given anything to parse. The new system sends raw data, which your client formats on the fly. A (totally incorrect) example of how that same thing now looks as sent from the server would be "DAMAGE_HIT, player, Murloc, fireball, fire, 50".

As you can imagine, this gives addons fantasic accuracy, and makes it much much easier for addons to watch specific combat happenings. Unfortunately it requires all addons that parsed the combat log for data to be pretty much rewritten. The author of Parrot is also the author of PitBull, CowTip, Cartographer, and FuBar, and for the time being he's put those projects ahead of Parrot. On the wowace forums he stated that he will update Parrot when he can, but suggests that until then people use another combat text addon. Personally I use Mik's Scrolling Battle Text (MSBT) and love it.

re: Bartender3

I don't use BT3; you might check the Bartender3 thread on wowace.com to see if others are experiencing the same problem or have found a solution.

re: UIs on different characters

The way settings are stored depends on the addon in question. Most addons have some kind of profile system to allow different configurations on different characters; some default to a global profile that's used for all characters, while others default to per-character profiles or even per-class profiles. I'd advise switching to character profiles for any addons you want to configure differently on different characters; most addons with profile support also support copying from one profile to another, so if you're currently using the global/default profile, you can switch to a character-specific profile and then copy the settings from the default profile. Then log on your other character, switch to the character-specific profile, and make any changes you want.

There is no way to change the profiles of all your addons at once, because there is no standardized (i.e. Blizzard-supported) way to implement profiles; it's up the addon's author to use one of several available libraries to manage profiles, or write his or her own profile system.