Update: The Undermine Journal Opens Up Realm Request Voting Page, Still US Only, More New Realms Added 7/18

The devoper over at The Undermine Journal has been hard at work yet again. Here is the new realm request voting page, however to increase your chances, you may also want to send them an email with ideas, suggestions, help, or any feedback.

Alliance-US

• Llane Alliance
• Malygos Alliance
• Nesingwary Alliance
• Perenolde Alliance
• Terenas Alliance

Horde-US

• Blackrock Horde
• Boulderfist Horde
• Darkspear Horde
• Drenden Horde
• Garrosh Horde
• Gilneas Horde
• Nordrassil Horde
• Vek’nilash Horde
• Warsong Horde

Developer News:

There were around 50 realm requests emailed in the past few days, and I just sorted through them all. I chose realms from those emails where the sender provided helpful feedback or was otherwise more charming than “Please add my realm, kthxbai.” Sorting through these emails is a bit ridiculous at this point, however. I’m working on a realm request page that’ll be quick and painless and show the top N realms with the most votes so people know where they stand. One realm vote per IP per day is the plan. Hope to have it up in 48 hours.

I’ve had many offers and questions about donations to The Undermine Journal. Not as many as realm requests, but close. It’s very encouraging that visitors feel so strongly about the tool when it isn’t yet feature complete.

I plan on opening up a paypal donation box once the site is in beta, so visitors can understand the kind of tools and support I intend to provide. I donations will vary in frequency and volume, and if I have to run the site a bit out-of-pocket, that’s okay since it’s a great learning experience for me (as has been Quick Armory). On a donation page, I’ll make it very clear that market data is not guaranteed, that this is completely dependent upon the Armory working somewhat properly, that Blizzard may break this tool by changing something beyond my ability to compensate, or that they my ask (nicely or not) for me to stop scanning their Armory and shut down the site. That’s always a possibility. Had some thoughts on how to have transparency in site costs and incoming donations for whenever that donation page comes up. Basically, it’s another annotated timeline.

However, if costs go up and donations can’t nearly cover it, and I have enough ideas for it, I can open up a part of the site for members. It could allow members extended benefits, such as personalized watch lists, market notifications (email/SMS), full downloads of current AH data in XML format, or maybe even a file in the Auctioneer saved data format, so you can import accurate data right from The Undermine Journal into the game. None of these features are even specced out yet, never mind have any code behind them, but that’s a direction I can take. My plan is that any core part of the site (market price and availability history, profession item lists, seller searches, etc) will remain free and I would never take an existing feature and push it behind a paywall. Any part of the site that is an extra bonus, or is specific to one user, may be a paid feature once it’s released. I have no idea on costs but I’m cognizant of the fact that it’s quite a barrier to ask someone to pay for ancillary data for one part of one game.

I’ll never do ads. Really, never. Nobody likes web ads, they’re annoying and cause security issues. I block ads for most sites with noscript, and I can’t blame others for doing the same. If site costs rise beyond donations and subscriptions, and I need to reduce costs, I’ll find some way to throttle performance or otherwise decrease usage underneath the supply. If that meant shutting down the site altogether, so be it. This is a project for me to continue learning more about web and database administration and development.

We’ll hope it doesn’t come to that. And that I reach beta soon so I can more easily fund additional realm scans.