Blizzard added a function to get around this, in response to this sort of chat-tunneling: SendAddonMessage [1]<p>It stops the drunk text-transform, and also doesn't have to worry about hiding the text from the channel you're trying to talk into.<p>Overall, Blizzard has been very good about adapting to what their addon community is trying to do. They add official support for hacks if they like what the addon does for the game, and deliberately break some if they don't like its effect.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.wowwiki.com/API_SendAddonMessage" rel="nofollow">http://www.wowwiki.com/API_SendAddonMessage</a>
As a Game Master we could see all these hidden communications betweens addons, and it would dwarf the amount of true communication a player would participate in. A raid group could be filled with 1,000 lines of addon chat a second, often contributing to lag that they would then complain about. Addons were powerful, but were certainly a source of many issues, and nobody wanted to hear that they needed to disable their addons to fix their issue.
The author is the principal of the company which produces RailsLTS, which I was involved in as a customer. I wasn't aware that we shared the WoW connection, but that makes me like them even more. (I sort of hope we do not need an advisory about RCE via session cookie tampering because Rails is drunk.)
I can verify that, when inebriated, I am a terrible judge of character, and trust many people I shouldn't (even when my friends try to warn me off)... The number of times I've gone out questing while drunk and ended up in the company of some loser (while wearing sub-optimal gear) is uncomfortably high. The next morning my memory is almost always corrupted. Only by sheer luck have I not yet been fragged in a PvP area (and having rolled female this life, I wouldn't have much chance of defending myself.)<p>Clearly, this is not a bug, but a feature.
That's a great story. How would you have fixed it without having to find another channel to transmit over? Could the plugin sense the character's condition and delay until it abated?
Ahhh, how I do miss the times of WoW pre-1.3, when addons could trigger spells and such at will.<p>I wrote a (likely very unsuccessful, as it's now disappeared from the internets) addon called DancingGnome, that allowed one to bind arbitrary input series to spells -- it was meant to bind dance pad moves to spells. Up-Up-Up for Fireball, Down-Up for Fireblast, those were (some of) my binds.<p>More successfully, though, I wrote Chatr, which popped up "IM" windows for private chats.<p>And another addon that allowed covert chats that looked like (to people with the addon) they were being said in public channels.<p>Ah, those were the times (for a given value of times).
There is a newish add on called oqueue it does a similar p2p hack to form groups across servers for rbgs and now raids (no in game feature for rbg forming). Very fun to hack the code and give yourself impossible stats for jokes and invites. Haven't done much more than that but the hack was useful when you are playing an under geared alternate character that punches way above its weight and can't find groups due to gear level.<p>I'm almost certain you could get yourself invites and hijack group leadership with it (the addon takes over those functions)
I wonder if this could be exploited by registering usernames that accord with the errors? The user would[0] then be trojanned in to people's friend list with a presumed level of trust they did not deserve.<p>Not sure if this would have any value, but I'm sure someone enterprising could find a way to exploit others trust. That's not a new concept.<p>[0] (This of course assumes that the only lisped-up content is the usernames, not the whole syntax, which I think is an acceptable assumption given that it's fully out of date anyway)
Not to be that guy, but how was this hard to find if WoW was adding the ...hic to the text? Couldn't you examine the exchange, see the ...hic and immediately recognize that would be added because drunk?
I wish I had thought of this when I was trying to develop a WoW Addon. I was building an advanced party gui and wanted to communicate the whereabouts of each user, but was stmyed about how to send information between each instance