Excuse the lack of articles here lately - I've been working on a WoW Armory-related side project that has turned out to be both a lot of fun and somewhat time consuming. Documentation on the Armory is scarce, so a fair bit of reverse engineering is required. It also doesn't help that the sneaky developers have instituted temporary IP bans for sites that try to pull too much too fast - working around that has been interesting.
Since the state of the game is currently in a bit of a lull I am going to bear down on this project while I have the chance, even if that means that I end up neglecting this site a little bit in the meantime. I will continue to keep the 3.1 updates and gear pages relatively fresh, and will be available via comments or email if I need to be reached.
Hopefully I won't be AFK for all that long, and I'll certainly share my project once I get it finished.
12 comments:
Well I will miss the regular posts but wish you the best of luck on the project!
The big problem is that the time I use for blogging is the same time I'd have to work on this project. I've been flip-flopping between both for a couple of weeks, but that means that I'm not very focused on either activity.
Working around such things as an IP ban is really nice... NOT. So did you figure out what the nr of requests per minute/hour etc are? Or did blizzard at least supply you with that kind of information?
Rotating IP might be an idea if it works (heard of it, never tried it).
I am thinking... isn't it possible to give every person visiting your site 10 url's that will be loaded, one by one, in a hidden frame, after one is loaded the information is parsed to your server using ajax, and then the next is loaded. A bit sneaky but at least it is not the same IP requesting those urls.
Btw really interested in what the goal of your application is?
Heya, good luck! :-)
I did a lot live-armory-xml pulling for our guild site a while back. Had to deal with the temp-bans, too. ;-)
Worked around it to only pull data if the cache was older than 2 days. This requires you to chache the data, of course. ^^
http://www.tardfactor.com/news/breaking-news-blizzard-implements-new-armory-throttling-policy
It's not that bad :P
I use 1.5-2sec myself and I'm running my updates in bulk every morning.
Thanks for the link. That's a lot lower than any other limit I'd seen speculated. Best I'd seen before was that once per 5s was usually safe.
haha, was wondering where you went off to!
good luck with the side project!
you can use something like TOR to proxy your requests as well
Sounds cool. Let me know if you need any help and I'll see what I can do.
Sounds like a fun project!
The problem with using TOR is that while it masks the origin IP, the final gateway server you use in the mix is still the same IP address, unless you try to randomly establish various connections using multiple routing gateways.
However, the list of official TOR gateways is public. Service providers who don't want people using the onion router can easily ban all of those IPs.
Not sure if this will be of help but there is a Blogsite that data mines the armory and may be able to help you!
http://armorydatamine.wordpress.com/
It may or maynot be of use but thought id mention it just in case!
Good luck with the project. 8)
Good Luck! You'll be missed, but priorities are priorities as we have learned with Mr. BRK. Do what's important and visit here when you can! =)
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