I have spent a couple of hours here and there leveling my wee little mage (now level 17), and since I had the absolutely brilliant idea to name that tool with the letter ‘A’, I get an average of 5-8 blind invites from level 1 warriors per hour.
Handling with the hassle of it through automation was done with the wowace-based AntiInvite, which at least takes care of auto declining invites from people I don’t know or haven’t talked to. Note to the authors: if you find a way to suppress the invite sound as well I’d love your tool even more.
But I’m totally fed up with the rest of it. I pay 15$ / month to play, and this does in no way, shape or form offer an invitation to get spammed for gold by RMT sweatshops and their automated cronies.
I sincerely wish that whoever spent even one minute coding a spambot in his dirty unprincipled life dies a horrible death in a freak accident involving a meat grinder and a gardening rake.
But beyond that, I have decided that I won’t promote gold-sellers or their direct or indirect daughter companies by giving them clicks or traffic.
This includes the three more popular wow item database sites bought by IGE, now owned by Affinity Media, which still and despite their many allegation to the contrary aren’t separate companies at all.
As a consequence, you won’t see Altitis joining the “powered by…” itemlinks bandwagon many of our blogging peers have been doing. This isn’t meant to pooh-pooh anyone else or whatever. The convenience of adding one simple line of script in the head section of a blog template to have item pop-ups all over the place is so damn tempting I have been considering it myself for a while. This weekend’s 3 hours of mage leveling tipped the balance against that for me though.
I will not sacrifice for convenience and stick to what I have been using for a while. And credit where credit is due, I’m still using the good ole’ same code initially developed by Okoloth of Armory Musings and enhanced by Gerald Howell (Severkill). But instead of pointing to one of the item databases part of Affinity Media / IGE, I will stick to using WoWDigger instead.
I have gone through past posts and edited all item links I could find, and hope I caught them all. If you see one I missed, please don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail.
Now again, to make my stance crystal clear, this isn’t a jab at anyone else. This is just a decision I made for Altitis and for myself, to not send any traffic at all to sites tied to gold selling, convenience be damned. I do not condone what they or their parent companies do, and if it means editing each item link manually, well, I have enough time to do that. Altitis doesn’t support gold selling, and that’s all there is to it.
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8 Responses to “Taking a Stand against Gold Selling”
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I’m not certain a lot of people know about the acquisition of three of the big WoW database sites by Affinity. I know I found out about it on accident, and I don’t even remember how. I think I will follow in your footsteps however and do the same, my mind never took that extra step in knowing that I was indirectly supporting gold selling by linking to those sites.
As long as Wowhead doesn’t put up ads for any gold-selling company, I couldn’t care less if they’re own by one or not: it’s certainly NOT where they’ll get their money from…
Out of curiosity: will you cancel your electricity contract if you find the company that owns it does something less good? (If you live in a place where you have options, you might, but here we only have 1 electricity provider!)
And, btw, who tells you that your beloved WoWDigger won’t get (if it isn’t already!), owned by IGE or whatever it’s name is?
Since utilities are publicly held in my country, I don’t have that issue to worry about
Wowdigger, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t owned by Affinity / IGE for the time being, and until otherwise informed, I’ll use them. And if not, someone smarter may eventually find a simple and elegant way to interface blogger with the Armoury, eliminating all risks.
Well, it’s your choice, even if I think it’s a bit on the extreme!
But I can understand the annoyance (BTW: Thanks for that add-on! Been wanting to look for one for ages but have been lazy: I’ll let you know when I download and install it, what line to remove for the sound effect!)
I personally like Wowhead because, of all I’ve found so far, is the one with less “old” garbage *and* the most complete filtering options. I can pinpoint what I want in a few clicks. I just tried WoWDigger and, even though it looks cool and seems to have some nice features, filtering item searches is not one of those.
Out of curiosity, I listed the warlock class spells and was a bit surprised by finding 6 whole pages of those! But, when I saw “Master Demonologist” repeated 25 times, I understood those 6 pages!
It does look promising though, and I may keep it bookmarked (for starters, I reported that bug back to them!)
As for the WoWArmory, that would be a lousy idea! It’s slow and unavailable enough now without others linking there! (Yes, I know it’s still a beta!)
But, I respect your call and I got a couple nice pointers from your post too!
About the sound: I took a look at the code, and the sound comes from the way the built-in popup works, that is, it’s not controlled by the add-on. The add-on “just” cancels and hides the popup if the conditions to show it are not met, but the built-in popup has already been fired by then, so it’s probably where the sound comes from.
Don’t know about functions to disable *specific* sounds in game, so I guess we’ll have to live with it!
Well, it’s your choice, even if I think it’s a bit on the extreme!
You know, it may just be. On the other hand, I’ve spent enough time telling people venting their discontent to vote with their pocketbooks, so it is time I start being consequent with stuff I really feel strongly about. Yes, wowdigger has less of polish so far than the other sites (though their feature to embed a character into a website appears unique), but so far, I can work around the inconvenience. And there’s also lootables.com which has some interesting features worth investigating further, and they too are dead against gold selling. Which is enough both for my own purpose and for the blog. Everyone should find the right balance between need, beliefs and convenience, and if your balance is different than mine, who am I to criticize you? It just feels like the right thing to do for me. A blog is a soapbox, though, and I am self-centered enough to proseltyze a bit on the matter.
Thank you for this post. I had researched the issue extensively when wowhead first sold out and believed the Affinity - IGE link was truly severed. But your post led me to new evidence that challenged that belief. I am now really torn between switching to wowdigger or sticking to wowhead. I abandoned allakhazam the day it sold, but it was much easier because wowhead was a great alternative. Sigh.
Hello,
First off thanks for the linkage to my blog!
Second, I respect what you are saying about the tooltips that link to Wowhead and Allakhazam. I tried looking into an alternative like linking directly from the WoW Armory or WoWDigger but had no luck. So, tonight I wrote a suggestion on the WoW Suggestion board asking they provide lite HTML like Allakhazam or a js file like Wowhead. Hopefully they will consider it. If you want to check it out you can go here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=9E3A2FF95BAE40BC134C757E74A3A289?topicId=3159756367&postId=31593820538&sid=1#0