Spam Collector Board -- Warmane Exclusive Addon!

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April 16, 2015
DarkGrudge

Spam Collector Board -- Warmane Exclusive Addon!
Revision History

Current version: 0.9.1b (http://www.lctwebdesign.com/SpamCollector_v0_91.zip)
- Raid icons now properly displayed
- Changed font to be a little easier to read.
Previous: 0.9b
- Initial community release!
- Not a lot of testing done yet -- only used by me so far
- No mini-map button is included (I personally hate the clutter). Type "/spamcollector show" to enable, if disabled
- STILL TODO: Improve display of raid symbols and coloring when quests and achievements are linked
Introduction

If you're anything like me, you've been completely annoyed by all of the general disregard for spam in the Global channels. Rather than trying to make people change their spamming habits (which, let's face it, won't happen), I decided to create an addon to help me cope with this behavior instead.

So, I created an addon I'm calling "Spam Collector Board," which attempts to organize the spamming into a cleaner, more useful, interface to review.
After using it for about a week now, it's been so useful I feel I should share it with the community for review and further development. I should be upfront in that this is only my second addon to create ever, so if anyone more experienced wants to assist in cleaning it up and applying better practices, that'd be much appreciated! Also, at the moment I have only tested it on WotLK servers, but if someone wants to try it on others, you can "load out of date" addons and see if it works.

What is it?

Spam Collector Board is an addon that attempts to organize the "Looking For" type spams, whether it's raids, RDF, or goods and professions. At it's core, it has two basic modes:
1. Smart Check - Will look for common keywords (such as "LFG", "LFxM", "NEED ALL", etc) and add them to the board, even if seen only once
2. Spam Only - Will only look for exactly repeated spam
Simply put: when the addon sees "looking for" type spam, it creates an entry on the new window once, and drops off when one minute has gone by since it was last seen. It allows for a much cleaner UI to see what people are looking for, and reduces to noise a bit (ie, only allows one item per character, meaning if they updated their message because they found a tank, it updates the one item on the Spam Board instead of adding a new item).

In other words, you go from this:
http://www.lctwebdesign.com/global.png

To this:
http://www.lctwebdesign.com/spamboard.png

Furthermore, if you see an entry you want to respond to, by clicking on the item it should start a "/w [name]" of the person who spammed the text, making responding quickly a lot easier.

Finally, it is worth noting that it collects all sources of chat for spam collection. Meaning, yells, global, /say, etc will appear in the board.

What Features Are Coming? How Can I Help?

I'm missing a couple features I'd like to be added still (feel free to assist if you can!):
- Add an optional mini-map button
- Resizable window - The window is fixed right now, as it was a lot easier to implement
- Display Quest/Achievement colors better - This wasn't immediately obvious to me how to do. If someone knows how to make this happen, please let me know!
- Filter Spam - Only show spam that also contains some user-defined keyword (such as "ICC" or "TOC" or "RDF" etc)
If you have additional suggestions for improvements or features, please let me know!

Thanks!

DarkGrudge
April 27, 2015
DarkGrudge

No feedback. Guess not as useful as I thought! :) Ah well..
April 27, 2015
Agramon

Quote:

Originally Posted by DarkGrudge

No feedback. Guess not as useful as I thought! :) Ah well..

Moved thread to "Community creations" boards. Now there's more chances to get feedback on that. :)
April 27, 2015
Sammy7

Sounds nice. It would make it harder to miss ICC 25 rep farms and VOA 25s.
April 27, 2015
Merlin23

Pug life addon :)
April 28, 2015
DarkGrudge

Quote:

Originally Posted by Agramon

Moved thread to "Community creations" boards. Now there's more chances to get feedback on that. :)

Thanks -- looks more appropriate to be here :).
April 28, 2015
Nivle

iam trying it out now.

edit: its works neatly :>
Also, i'm writing some LUA and iam kinda stuck, mind if i PM you for some help ?
April 29, 2015
DarkGrudge

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nivle

iam trying it out now.

edit: its works neatly :>
Also, i'm writing some LUA and iam kinda stuck, mind if i PM you for some help ?

Sure! Thanks for the feedback -- let me know what you see.
May 4, 2015
iamjulka

I've tried it on Cataclysm (changed interface number in .toc file - dirty hack).

My notes:
Without digging through source code I didn't know that slash commands are /sc and /spamcollector - they are not posted even here.

It works in Cata (sometimes gets random messages, can isolate quest starting).

First time started it opens two windows of itself; confusing.

I'd change formatting from msgs[no][1] to msgs[no][timeago] and similar. Not only even now I had to check what's in the first slot of data (the numbers are non-descriptive) but also it makes adding new data and reordering display of existing easier; now you had to rewrite your code related to msg removals were you to add data for new columns.

I lack the ability to set custom timeout, like 45 or 46.5 seconds. It isn't hard (I've already done that), just add /sc timeout x command where x is the number of secs to save.

Split slash commands by space and check if appropriately named function exists. Makes adding features easier.

I lack the ability to change the size of the window and individual columns. Make window width and height saved variables if you need to.

Some sorting support would be great. Now it sorts messages based on time the sender first appeared - not really useful.

It would be brilliant if you preserved item links and clicking on them would have usual WoW behaviour instead of starting a whisper. For example, I always check the achievement of raid leader and here Spam Collector is actually counterproductive.

Could you publish Spam Collector to GitHub so I could properly fork and implement some of the changes?

It's awesome.
May 6, 2015
DarkGrudge

Thanks for the awesome feedback! I'll get it posted to GitHub in a day or two.

It is definitely (and admittedly!) dirty in it's implementation, as it was really just a "proof of concept" for me. After I got it hacked together enough to work, it seemed quite useful for my use immediately and wanted to share it. I didn't do any real clean-up effort on it before sharing.

I'd absolutely welcome your initiative to clean it up and add features!

PS: I intentionally had it sort by the order in which they arrived because I found it moved way to frequently if it updated based on newest/oldest (since people are spamming the same content it gave the appearance of new messages coming in when they were actually the same as before, making it very hard to read at peak times). Sorted by when they arrived seemed to make it easier to keep track of new spamming, which is what I was often using it for (though, a "soft-ignore" feature would probably serve that purpose better, admittedly).