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Originally Posted by Trilesch
also I have been speaking to my partner about other plugins that we can make and since lotro.data is no longer we have thought about making a plugin the pulls all the character info and saves it as a xml file to be uploaded to a website aswell and kinship info and such.
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FWIW, I had already considered making AltInventory and AltViewer data available as a replacement for data.lotro but there are a number of significant issues. The biggest problem is the bug in GetEquipment that crashes the client which is also why AltViewer got sidelined and never updated - Narrel indicated that he will be working on some bug fixes, particularly focusing on crashes for a future update so there may be hope for a fix. The second biggest problem is preventing abuse of the upload mechanism (people purposely uploading bogus data to harass others) but I had already worked out a fairly good solution for that. The third issue is the lack of other data via the API such as kinship/quest/deed data - just providing basic character info like name, class and level isn't worth the effort. A fourth issue is the inability to derive an itemID programmatically which makes keeping track of item data more difficult and in some cases impossible atm - we've already requested that Narrel look into this but it may take quite a while before we see itemIDs in the API, if ever. The last major issue is that an external executable would have to be distributed to perform the actual uploads and that leads back to potential for malicious code.
Another concern is the lack of graphic resources (particularly item icons) - we used to be able to link to Turbine's site to display item icons and popup info but that source is no longer updated so any graphics would have to be hosted on the web server which would get into copyright issues (using a few icons could be considered fair use but hosting all item icons would definitely require written permission from Turbine which is unlikely to happen). Since Narrel indicated that some of the data.lotro functionality may get resurrected at some distant point in the future there may also be hope for a solution to this issue.
So, while it sounds like a nice idea, publishing character data isn't really feasible at this time.
I have also been working on a strictly local solution that would allow users to see their character info while off-line and supporting multiple accounts (Lua can't support characters from multiple accounts without using symbolic links and that messes up the per account "ALL" category)