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.

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.

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.