New updates: see the bottom of the post

We’ve received a few e-mails over the past couple weeks concerning our connection to the Armory and users’ inability to update or create signatures. First of all, thank you so much to everyone who’s been involved, concerned, and taken the time to report the issue. Over the past year this site has received relatively low attention and no additions or developmental changes because of shifting priorities and time constraints. Life happens, eh?

But over the few years that we’ve been running, we’ve seen over 15,000 users create signatures on our system and many folks happy with how slender our signatures were, how easy they were to update, and how widely they were used on public forums. THANK YOU.

With the relatively recent consolidation of the Armory into battle.net and the launch of Blizzard’s mobile armory, they’ve removed wowarmory.com altogether and we’ve yet to discover any public XML feed with armory data. (If you know of one, let us know — I have yet to find anything). My guess is that they want to control that data and how it’s used.

So until we can modify our application to accept purely manual updates with no auto-populated information from the armory, we’re basically going to close down ToonSig until we can made those necessary modifications and release a version 2.0 with some new features to make up for the lack of connectivity to Blizzard’s data.

If you are a PHP developer and are interested in collaborating with us in the future, get in contact with me at support@toonsig.com along with a resume and sample of your work and I’ll gladly consider you for any further development that we do.

But for now, we’re just backing up all our files and all the 15,000+ signatures that have been generated to-date and plan on re-grouping to shift the focus of ToonSig and how we offer the same (and additional) services, but better.

Thanks for your understanding and for your loyalty to ToonSig. Please follow us on Twitter (@toonsig) and you’ll receive notifications of when we have further changes in the works or come to some semblance of a solution.

Thanks and peace out!
Beerbubble // ToonSig support

UPDATE (9/2/2011 4:15 CST): We’ve found the API to the armory, and are now in the process of acquiring a key and will likely have to do a bit of rewriting to the application to interact with the new data structure. I’ll likely take this opportunity to rewrite a lot of our code and make some improvements. Follow us on Twitter to stay updated @toonsig.

First of all, I want to thank you for making ToonSig your preferred WoW character signature generator — over 20,000 signatures have been generated at ToonSig to-date! We’re elated to say the least! But enough jibber jabber…to the updates!

We’ve updated ToonSig to support the new Worgen and Goblin races — so when Cataclysm hits the streets, we’ll be ready for you!

Speaking of Cataclysm, the Armory has been updated with some new information available to us and we think that we can make some significant updates to make things more optimal behind the scenes to manage your signatures. Fortunately the changes in the Armory haven’t been so dramatic, in that our app works as-is. But with that said, we’ve got some changes up our sleeves in the coming months.

We want to improve your experience at ToonSig and are going to make the process for creating and updating your signatures easier, faster, and more convenient — in addition we want to provide you some tools for your guild to connect with each other and collaborate. There are a few known issues and bugs, and we’d normally address them with a patch; but we’ve got a re-build up our sleeves and hope to issue that out in the coming months.

Some of the changes include:

• Continued free signature generation (non-hosted)
• Premium hosted signature generation with your armory data stored for quick updates
• New signature themes for premium members
• Guild collaboration tools
• Tiny URL style links for all your signatures and profiles
• Raid calendar for premium members
• And more…

Watch for details here at the Captain’s Log.

Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve gone through the logs to check where we’re at with signatures being generated, how often they’re updated, and being served up and viewed on a daily basis. ToonSig is pretty self-sufficient and generally runs pretty smoothly without much intervention on my part. So I don’t log in much to check how things are going.

Well, apparently we’ve generated and served up over 15,000 signatures now, which is quite an impressive number considering we started just one year ago this last February. I’m quite flattered that you all have chosen ToonSig to generate your World of Warcraft forum signatures. I hope that we can continue to accommodate that need out there.

As a part of general maintenance, I will go through and remove old images that have not been updated nor viewed within a particular time frame, ensuring that we keep our database and file system clean, current, and remove signatures that are stagnant and have had no activity for some time. Today I went through and removed about 3,500 old signatures, ones that have not been updated nor viewed since January 31st, 2010. We’ve still got a strong base of users keeping their signatures current and are serving up on average 100,000 signature views per day, and of that, nearly 3,000 unique signatures. Not bad.

With Cataclysm coming up, we’re looking to expansion of services for ToonSig and hope to continue to provide a quality service to you. Thanks for using ToonSig!

Today we released version 0.6.4 that contains a few small fixes, including the following:

• We’ve got rid of the advertisement on the character generation screen in favor for a donate button. Please consider donating to ToonSig — it helps cover our hosting/bandwidth costs, encourages future development efforts, and does a little good in the world. We contribute 10% of all donations received to UNICEF to offer aid to those struggling in developing nations. Donate today.
• We also fixed a slight bug in the talent spec display. Primary specs were showing up based upon what was currently enabled in your character, not what is necessarily your primary spec. We have fixed that and now your primary and secondary specs will display appropriately.

Purging inactive signatures that have neither been updated and viewed before August 14, 2009. There are a TON of signatures that have been created but don’t appear to be used, so we’re going back and purging all toons that have not been updated and not viewed more than 90 days ago.

Current signature count: 5,888
After purge: 5,235
Total toons purged: 653

We’re clearing out signatures older than July 1st that have not been updated or viewed since then, both registered members and non-member signatures. These purges are intended to keep our database and image repository current and encourage active use of ToonSig and the signatures that you create.

Purge results: 251 old signatures removed from the database and image library.

It’s Tuesday morning, I haven’t had my coffee yet, and have a little bit of bear in me today. Grrrr! And nothing makes bears more feisty than orphaned and neglected toon signatures that have not been given the chance to shine. That, and maybe if you poke at him or steal the six pack that he rightfully stole from you because you left it sitting out overnight outside your tent.

Grrrr! /swipe

Ok, the criteria for this house cleaning… signature images and their correlating recordsets are being removed if:

• Has not been updated before April 1st
• No recent HTTP activity or requests with that image (not being used on websites or forums and seen)

One important piece has been left out… toons that are assigned to a member account. The above purge includes signatures bound to accounts that have no HTTP REQUEST activity (i.e., they are not being used or seen, and are not being served up by us).

May the purging begin.

// purge result: 136 signatures removed

While some of the French were confirming the semantics between this and next Wednesday, informing us that patch would be coming the Wednesday that follows this next Wednesday — phew need to catch my breath — patch 3.2 is effectively live today. I finished downloading it this morning and installing it and have to endure the 8–4:30 grind before I can battle the lag boss tonight.

In what is probably related news, the Armory server has not been refreshing data all weekend and is still out of date. So if you gained a level or two, racked up some achievement points, or got some uber gear in Ulduar and your stats aren’t reflecting it, give it a bit of time. We hope that the Armory will be refreshing data again after this patch hoopla settles down.

As you might have picked up from our Twitter feed, we’re planning out the development of a raid and event calendar system for your guild that integrates right into our ToonSig system. This calendar would be synced up to your toon information, which would include class, spec, and level information available to raid leaders for scheduling and picking members for their raids. Additionally, we’re considering expanding it to realm-wide raids for PUGs and larger events like capital city raids and such.

So we want to know what you think. Would you and your guild be open to trying a new raid calendar system, or are you pretty well locked into what you’re using now? Would it change your mind if it were free? Take our poll:

Some of the features that we’re considering into the development of the raid/event calendar:

• Automated spec integration, allowing you to choose appropriately from tanking, healing, dps, and hybrid roles
• Automated level integration, ensuring that you sign up appropriate minimum level requirements for raids or instances
• Single-click approval administration
• E-mail notifications and reminders
• Custom URL’s for your guild raid calendar
• RSS feed of your events and raids
• And more…

If you have some great ideas that you would like to contribute, just post them below in the comments section. Also, if you would like to participate in the beta testing when development is near complete, e-mail us: support AT toonsig DOT com and provide your toon name(s), your realm name (indicating US server or EU server), and an e-mail address that we can use for sending and obtaining feedback.