Hi guys! It's zanix, back with an announcement post!

This is to anyone that can actually hear me, I guess, since traffic is way lower than it was back in our heyday. I'm not sure if even past WoWRoster die-hards will even ever read this.

So today I wanted to talk about the past and future of this little site.

I started out with WoWRoster all the way back around 2005 (it was just called "roster" back then) when I looking for a way to show a more dynamic way to view my guild members and their profiles on a guild website. After installing it on my server I found there were a couple things I could improve on. After submitting a few changes and fixes I was invited to be an official contributor.

My memory gets a bit fuzzy after this but I will try to include everything I can remember.

Sometime around the release of version 1.5.0 AnthonyB stepped down and handed over the reigns of the "Roster" site. Since then I invited a few more contributors. We worked hard on improving roster, we added more functionality, we added templating, Adric added a great theme, we added an addon system, the list goes on. When we added addon support, we saw a flood of additional functionality from other developers. Even with the release of Blizzard's Armory, someone stepped up and crafted an addon to sync data from it instead of requiring guild and character profiler for roster data.

The multiple server migrations. I recall asking for donations a few times to pay for server costs. I want to thank all those who donated their money to keep the site going when we asked for help. Looking back I think I may have been a bit naive in thinking we needed a huge expensive server to host wowroster.net. Maybe we did back then when we were getting thousands of hits per month, I have no idea. Today wowroster.net sits on a web server in the back room of an internet service provider.

Speaking of the Armory, I think this was the peak of the populatory of WoWRoster and the beginning of our decline.
Before the Armory, we were the best solution to hosting your own guild and character profiling system. I recall many solicitations from gold and character sellers to buy our code to use to sell their wares. Of course we always denied them but I'm sure they just forked the code after being rejected and used it anyway.

I cannot blame Blizzard for the decline of WoWRoster, that was mostly on us developers. Life happened, we got jobs, had families, and our free-time was slipping away. I pretty much stepped down around 2012 and let Ulminia take the lead. While I still hosted the site and provided a few bug fixes, I pretty much dropped out completely after the release of version 2.2.0.

I know I already kinda spoiled this in the forum post topic, but here it is...

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that I will be closing this forum and the wiki. The forum and wiki software are getting old and need upgrades to keep secure and able to run on newer server software. I nor Ulminia have the time to put into upgrades so both the forum and the wiki will be archived off to static pages and I will serve them for as long as I am able. I have already begun this process by closing off new registrations to the site, making some code modifications to facilitate being archived, and testing a crawler that creates static pages. I hope by the end of this weekend or next I will have the site archived and thus the actual forum and wiki code and database will be shut down, archived, stored, and replaced with the static pages.

As for the the code on GitHub, it will stay there for as long as GitHub exists or they remove it or they make me move it.

I want to think everyone that ever contributed their help, code, documentation, translations, core developers, addon developers, and the community who all helped keep this project going all these years.

A quick "ha ha" moment.

Surprising no one, I haven't had time to properly archive the site into static files yet. Each attempt has resulted in an archive that is broken and I haven't been able to completely fix it. I also want to look into converting the wiki into a GitHub wiki so it's better preserved.

I have also gotten a couple requests to host the site. Thanks for the offers but hosting is not an issue. Even if this site wasn't being hosted on my own hardware for free, I could still host it on a number of servers I manage.
The issue here is maintenance. WoWRoster is essentially a dead project and I want to archive and preserve as much as I can without having to worry about security exploits in php, the forum, the wiki, or other issues.

Anyway, I will eventually get this done.

This is the release date of WoW Classic. There's no official armory for it. Any plan to support this?

I have been gone from this community for about 10 years now. When WoW Classic was announced I wondered if the WoWRoster community was still around and if roster would be available again. Looks like all of the devs have moved on to other projects. I haven't been coding for several years but would love to see this resurrected. Happy questing everyone!

Takika wrote:This is the release date of WoW Classic. There's no official armory for it. Any plan to support this?

There are no plans, all of the original devs have moved on and no one else has picked it up since.

mdeshane wrote:I have been gone from this community for about 10 years now. When WoW Classic was announced I wondered if the WoWRoster community was still around and if roster would be available again. Looks like all of the devs have moved on to other projects. I haven't been coding for several years but would love to see this resurrected. Happy questing everyone!

Yes, we all have moved on but I've been trying to keep the site alive so it doesn't all just vanish into history.
The code itself lives on GitHub, hopefully it's safe there.