HTML Datamining and You

Now that the API is live, we want to make you all aware that HTML datamining (via us.battle.net/wow or any of the other regional wow sites) is not acceptable. Within the next 7 days, we will start to blacklist users that are making excessive requests to our regular community sites.

If you are currently in the process of porting over to the API and have not requested a key yet, please do so. We do not want to interrupt service for community sites that are following that path.

Please email api-support@blizzard.com with specific questions/concerns, or reply to this thread with any general comments.

Thank you for your cooperation!

@Tericho: Consider this the notice. We've had the API 'out there' for 2-3 months now, so there really isn't an excuse to have not STARTED porting your code over by now.

@Sabatieni: I believe he was mining the old Armory data that we decommissioned last week, but if he switched to the new site, its possible.

@Chaud: This is really targeted at data we support on the API (Character Profiles, Guild Profiles, etc).

We won't be targeting Forum data miners initially, but there is an off-chance some may get caught up in the API miner sweep, so I'd suggest contacting us if that might be the case.

Just to be clarify further - unless you're making 1000s of requests a day, its unlikely you'll get caught up in this :) This is highly unlikely to apply to blue tracker sites (Assuming they are doing it sensibly), or personal guild sites.

The first round of blacklisting has occurred. It should become immediately apparent if an application has been caught in this (The WoW site will respond with a 503 error code consistently).

We will continue to blacklist as appropriate on a weekly basis, but we will NOT be actioning sites that we can identify and who have contacted us with a timeline on when they will be porting over to the API.

Now that the API is live, we want to make you all aware that HTML datamining (via us.battle.net/wow or any of the other regional wow sites) is not acceptable. Within the next 7 days, we will start to blacklist users that are making excessive requests to our regular community sites.

If you are currently in the process of porting over to the API and have not requested a key yet, please do so. We do not want to interrupt service for community sites that are following that path.

Please email api-support@blizzard.com with specific questions/concerns, or reply to this thread with any general comments.

Thank you for your cooperation!

Hello, Osundir.

Some questions, if I may. I wasn't sure if by general comments, you meant questions as well. If not, I will email the appropriate people, and I apologize.

To start off, I am a newb at programming in general, but I would really like to be a regular WoW addon developer. I've made a simple one in the past called Pokegotchi: Eevee Edition, though I've neglected to update it and it therefore fell under the radar.

So my first question is this: What exactly is datamining and what type of addons (if any) would use this? My guess would be that some program pulls data from a website to be used in-game or something, like for a table of certain items. But it's just a guess...

Second: What does "porting over to the API" mean? Um... I'm not gonna guess on that one.

Third: If someone were to become blacklisted, is there a way to be taken off the list?

And what is probably the most important question: Would this even be something I would use? This question would apply if any addons even use datamining. The type of addons I initially plan to develop are simple vanity addons that don't really do anything useful to the game. They will be minigames, most likely something similar to the Pokegotchi one.

I'm just wondering if this is something I will use because I'm not sure if it would be easier to have a .lua file to store all the information about the pets in or if I'd be better off using an external website (if that's even possible!).

Sorry for bombarding you with all these questions. If anyone else has any input, I'd love to hear it. I'm still pretty new to UI development and would love to someday make my own successful and (mostly) bug-free addons. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
~~~Cammy

TL;DR: Does apply to people wanting to develop addons for World of Warcraft, or is this just a website-related thing?

This forum doesn't cover anything related to Wow addon development. It is unrelated.