Addon spam slows us down

#0 - June 25, 2010, 10:03 p.m.
Blizzard Post
It's not about whether an addon like gearscore is good or bad- it is about the unseen spam addons send to others, slowing us down.

If you run the addon Spamalyzer, you can mouse over its icon on minimap and see who is sending what addon spam- especially in groups/raids.

Gearscore is one of the highest spammers, carbonite, gatherer, pallypower, and various versions of "LibHealComm" are also high.

The spam affects us all, whether you have the addon yourself or not. I am glad at least something is being done to attempt to reduce it.

#1 - June 25, 2010, 10:09 p.m.
Blizzard Post
It's important to understand that this wasn't really the fault of addon authors. This needed to be fixed because we were allowing something we really shouldn't have. Many addons pull Inspect data when mousing over characters and there was nothing on our end to throttle the rate at which that data could be pulled. So if you're standing in Dalaran with one of these mods and slide your mouse across the screen and over several characters within a very small amount of time, your client is spamming the database with Inspect queries. We're correcting that issue on our end.
#25 - June 25, 2010, 11:55 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Q u o t e:


Will this change make it so we have a "1 inspect per 5 seconds" system? Or will it only throttle your requests if you are sending a massive number of requests within a small time frame?

We're starting by capping the number of Inspects that can be sent in a 10-second time frame. It'll likely be 5 Inspects, but that could change in either direction.

Q u o t e:


Oh. Wow.

I never knew that this happened. I now feel really horrible for being a complete and utter addon %*#%%.

All those poor people whose machines can barely run WoW.. I'M SORRY. D:

Q u o t e:
It seems a bit over the top and melodramatic, but it's accurate.

You were, unknowingly, a part of the overall problem whenever someone in your raid with a less-than-awesome computer disconnected during Thorim attempts.

:-)

Keep in mind that this change is intended to help those using addons which are sending a lot of these requests from lagging or disconnecting. If you're not actually using such addons, and therefore not sending a large number of queries to our database, the change won't affect you either way. You're not lagging or disconnecting because someone else in a raid or major city is unknowingly spamming such requests.