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.

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

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.