Talk:API C ChatInfo.SendAddonMessage

Malicious Function
I would bring this up on the US official forums myself if I had an US-Account. Obviously Blizzard employees don't read any of the EU-Forums.

I think SendAddonMessage is malicious because:
 * It provides an option for DoS attacks ingame that's NOT in any way trackable by the normal user at all and only hardly by the skilled addon programming user (yeah, its the worst case of all, but true)
 * It can - and most likely will - seriously narrow down remaining bandwidth for Guild / Party / Raid members - with worst case a big guild's 40 men raid group where some people use different addons with the same "application" (eg. DamageMeters and recap, GuildAds and GuildEventManager, ct_raidassist and ??) and will cause players to unexpectedly disconnect.

For Blizzard: Disable that function until you implement a RegisterAddonChannel system, or disable it at all

For AddOn programmers: Avoid using SendAddonMessage unless you have to share only "very" limited data. But keep in mind that there may be 39 in a raid or 99 in a guild that are absolutely not interested in that messages you're sending to them.

If any of you reading this is a US-Account owner, it would be nice from you to place a topic in the us-forums and get some attention from eg slouken.

(It seems I'm a bit late with this, but I didnt realize the malicious character of the function until now...) -watchout 16:08, 22 August 2006 (EDT)


 * SendAddonMessage still has a limit where if you send too many messages you're disconnected, the normal user will not understand enough to be able to figure out what's sending it or whats going on, if you look at some of the stuff CTRA sends it's going to be hard for a normal user to understand "Oh that's CTRA, it's okay" VS "That's junk data trying to spam me".
 * Infact, SendAddonMessage is even better then channels because people can't join and send bad data they have to be in the guild, raid, ect. - Shadow 00:35, 23 August 2006 (EDT)


 * But if I don't have CT_Raid and am not in the channel, I won't get any trash-data over my connection, instead I can't do anything against it now, because there is just no way of telling what really happened.
 * there is also the slight thing that all those addons stack their data: when using FlagRSP and CT_RaidAssist I often got D/C when joining a Raid in Ironforge, guess what happens in BWL when the whole raid gets a debuff at once and someone of the guild enters the game and guildads decides to send him some data. Maybe if you're using GuildAds and have a decent connection there will just be a slight break in the game, but there are many people without a T1+ line. You dont even have to have a single addon - you will get the message anyway because its an event.
 * The idea is good, the implementation lacks some refining. But lets hope I'm wrong and you're right -watchout 03:53, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Spatially Said
Repost from wow-europe forums and ui.worldofwar.net forums.

The new SendAddonMessage function is an amazing, clean way to do addon communication in my opinion, but there's one thing that is sorely lacking from it in my opinion. The SAY channel. This would basically remove the need for, say, flagRSP or MyRolePlay (those who don't know, these allow roleplayers to describe their characters in amazing detail) to have separate world-wide channels for their communication (server admins, rejoice, less bandwidth necessary) since they would be able to only send the descriptions to people near them (and also would keep WoWChatLog.txt clean!).. And I'm sure others can figure out good uses for this functionality as well.

An auxiliary suggestion/feature request for the SendAddonMessage function would be a ZONE channel, but I'd be happy if I had SAY. :)

Hopefully this gets through to the developers! (If anyone has an US account, I'd love to see this reposted (linked) there!) Also, comments and /sign or /agree very much appreciated. :)

Akx 01:18, 5 September 2006 (EDT) (edit: signed)

Literal Transmissions
I removed a comment indicating \n would disconnect you. This is not the case. SendAddonMessage transmits literals. You can even do something such as SendAddonMessage("PFX", "\124cffff0000rawr I r red\124 lol invalid escape sequence\n\t", "GUILD") and this will not disconnect you. SendAddonMessage does not have the same restrictions as SendChatMessage. It may have been this way before, but it most certainly is not now. --Shirik 15:27, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

WoW Official Forums
At the risk of sounding stupid or having the flame gun aimed at me... has anybody actually posted their reservations at forums.WorldOfWarcraft.com. I'm not sure what difference having an EU vs US account makes on Blizz's official World of Warcraft site (which is *not* worldofwar.net). Correct me if I'm wrong or misunderstnding this talk page.

Maximum Length
I see Foxlit added in 2011 that the maximum message length is at most 250 characters. Looking up the blue-post archives, I found that slouken wrote in 2006 that the combination of "prefix" and "message" must be no longer than 254 bytes. Does anyone know if this is something that has evolved, or if perhaps slouken's original limitation is still valid? -- DDC (talk) 00:53, 30 June 2020 (UTC)