BigWho Library Suite

THIS IS STILL ALPHA (UI Unfinished, Data working)
See all data collected by opening BigWhoLib.lua in SavedVariables

Ever wanted to search through players that you have seen before but are no longer online? Or cannot remember what guild a player was in? Now you can!

Extends the Who list and soon the Guild list to a searchable player and guild database. Although the UI currently only shows players, all player and guild data is currently being collected passively as you play. This includes: Player name, level, guild, guild rank, zone, race, faction, class, etc. Not only that, but it tracks last seen times for all, keeping track of past guilds, guild ranks, levels, zones, etc. Anything that might be useful for recruitment, disputes, even PUG and GDKP runs.

How it Collects...Lessons Learned from CensusPlus

Using tricks that CensusPlus addon used in the early days of classic, a query is sent every time you turn your camera view or drive your character via mouse. But unlike CensusPlus, scans are NOT exhaustively searched, but instead using adaptive learning through 'tuples' (2-letters) to net as many non-zero-results as the highest priority purpose is to update current data rather than brand new data. This was a notable drawback in CensusPlus as many census takes would be stuck on one Class for an incredibly long time to the point where data on horde side was mostly 'Mages' during peak hours. The other drawback was Level 1 characters, this addon will never passively scan any level 1's if it can help it. Queries will always start from Level 2 to MAXLEVEL. This also helps with building an untainted corpus to build tuples so that the most effective fish net can be cast into the population.

Toys from TinyTooltip

Another trick is through 'mouseover' target, as this is the only way to accurately peek inside guilds and their rank structure. TinyTooltip is exceptional when displaying this information, so why not capture it as well. This includes opposing faction players and their guild structures. Early development alpha builds would capture pet ownership data too, but it has since been dropped due to... warlock pets not playing nice as well as 'special' (rare, named, etc) hunter pets that maintain their unique data and would sometimes crash the addon. So... no pet data will be stored.

Meta Bloat

That meta data in the SavedVariables -> BigWhoLib.lua is for transitional and historical purposes and might not be removed, we'll see how TBC beta plays out. To save future trouble it is used to keep the file size down as only the bare essentials are stored for each player and guild but still human readable and understandable for anyone opening up the possibly massive file wishing to read what's inside.

Logs...["L"]

Everything is timestamped, and that means everything. These are stored as snapshot logs rather than sequential, so if the same data already exists, only the timestamp will change. A single player going to every corner of Azeroth and seen will be noted for every zone they were seen at and at last time. The same is for former guilds, rankings, the ranking names, everything. Currently there is no UI to view it... yet.

Known issues:
- For the moment guild searches are done via the player list search box using the 'g-GUILDNAMEHERE'
- UI Player list has been restricted to 500 players.
- The original /who is restricted and will probably not work as queries are being used to scan the realm.

Not a Bug:

- Guild ranks are only entered via 'mouseover' player targets as that data is not collected via a WhoQuery, so seeing players in a guild without a guild rank is normal.