Guildwork No Longer Has Charcter Linked

Thanks for the update. I guess the underlying problem is having these folks as single points of failure or bottlenecks. Surely there's a way they can hand off some sort of operational duty or set up a continuity plan in case they get hit by a bus or whatever. There's gotta be a way that can be made amenable. Set up some CI/CD or something where trusted folks can make changes while not relinquishing the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.

To be clear, this current issue we're all doing our best not to be impatient about impacts the shouts/yells box, bazaar search, and gear/achievement tracking. Am I leaving out anything important?

I really don't see that happening personally because of whom is behind both sites. (FFXIAH and Guildwork)

FFXIAH is closed down behind the scenes because of the tool(s) used to connect to and poll the AH for information that was made by Cliff years ago. I don't know what kind of arrangement was made between him and Scraggs at the time, but Rooks is at the mercy of that agreement and decisions. He does not have direct access to pretty much anything from what he told me a while back and everything still has to go through Scraggs to actually be pushed live.

The same situation goes for Guildwork, where Rooks is also at the mercy of Stan (and I believe 1-2 other people). From what I remember Rooks saying, again, he does not have direct access to things and is still required to go through others to get things pushed/updated live.

I think this often leads a lot of people to blame Rooks for things being broken because they see him as 'Admin' and just assume he has full control but it's out of his hands. (He also has mentioned several times on this site and other places that he was really busy with RL and had no time to work on things directly outside of moderation and such until more recently.)


I'm only familiar with the side of things we (Ashita and Windower) were given access to.

Both projects (Ashita/Windower) made their own seperate plugins that at the time of initial creation were approved by Stan, but basically later went onto being entirely maintained outside of the actual Guildwork website. Along with that, there is/was a private repo that had myself, Stan, and a few of the Windower team members which held the source code to the Guildwork.exe and the Windower plugin at the time. (Side note, Guildwork.exe is just python compiled into an exe, anyone can dump it back to raw source.)

That said, we didn't have access to the site side of things at all except at the time, the layout of how the AWS instance was setup to hold the exe, plugin dlls, and some extra data files. But we had no direct access to it or the site.

I'm only speaking on what I know directly from what I was part of, what I've been told and what is already posted on this site/forum. Rooks may have been given more access since though, but based on history of both sites administration, I doubt it.

Sounds like anyone who would want to get involved with this project would just end up being frustrated.

Sites, which are running like this, are prone to shut down at a random date because a single person decided to say "screw it".

Please tell me I'm wrong.

Not wrong, but if that one person doesn't want to give up the reins or w/e there isn't much we as a community can do about it. Short of hope some others step in to fill the void. That's clearly not happening at this point as a competitor but might happen if the site goes dead only time will tell

It's entirely possible he doesn't know how to fix it, or at least hasn't touched it for so long he forgot the intricacies of how it was all setup.

He probably hasn't touched it in 3-4 years since there was no need to.

The bigger problem, is if it's this hard to fix something like this imagine if the developers somehow change how the auction house works in some minor way. Then there will be no sales listings either.

Sadly, you're correct. Ultimately it will be up to a few various factors on what will cause a site to continue on if it were to 'die' and/or shutdown. Those being things such as:

- Any license agreements made in the background users may not be aware of.
- Any good-faith agreements made in the background users may not be aware of.
- Any paid for assets/tools/etc. that are not able to be made public.
- Any paid for API accounts/keys that are not able to be made public.
- Any sensitive user data such as payment details, personal identifiable data, etc.

It's not always as easy as just handing things off or making something public/open source. NDA's would exist to cover a lot of these, which would be broken if just handed off or made public without adhereing to strict guidelines and in some cases laws.

Guildwork's demise is mostly on Stan and how he treats most of his projects leading up to Discord. He had a large tendency to push something hard, milk it dry for what he can get out of it, then abandon it soon as it starts to die and he no longer sees a profit future with it.

Sadly, that's business for you and how things pretty much happen with anything involving money.

In regards to FFXIAH, I'd say it's probably a similar story with Scragg, except there are other things at play I'll get into below.



I don't personally feel like this is the case. And rather its just a lack of communication and ability to have someone able to directly work on things that are broken. Rooks is gated behind having to middle-man things to Scraggs to push live. He has no direct access to what would need to be worked on/fixed, so it leads to the long delays in updates people have seen on this site over the last years since Rooks became admin. (Again, this is not Rooks' fault.)



Recreating this site isn't hard to do and all the information needed to recreate the headless client to connect to the AH servers and dump history data is freely available. However, there are issues that would come from having a public tool that everyone could use whenever they wanted be available. (ie. a plugin for Ashita/Windower to directly do lookups per-item and junk.)

Hammering the AH server with that many requests, all the time, will definitely put SE on notice to potentially change things and thus, brick this site in the process. It is why we (Ashita) have opt'd to not release a plugin we made that can do this already publicly. We do not want to put a site that the community widely uses at risk for a small convenience.

We have no means to determine if any type of agreement was made, or if it may contain things such as:

- How often FFXIAH's tool can ping their servers.
- How often FFXIAH's tool can dump/cache a full servers AH history.
- How large of batches the tool is allowed to run for.
- How many categories the tool is allowed to dump in one go.
- How many times per-hour, per-day, per-week, etc. it is allowed to run.
- Is the tool still a headless homebrewed client or did SE open a private API?

And so on. This falls under the behind the scenes agreements, good faith agreements, potential NDA's, etc.

So while someone can easily recreate this site, will it have the same 'positive' response FFXIAH was given and a 'silent' ok from SE to continue running?

I mean he has an active and current github and twitter account, has nobody that knows what they are talking about tried contacting him?

WOW. NICE!

I feel like that spider web is my spirit animal.

That's real good. If only it didn't make me sad ;;

ok, that's a good edit.

I can hear the music in the top pic. Awesome job.

Just want to get in my monthly: "any updates or news?" bump

Everyone, feel free to chastise me for my impatience

It's actively being worked on by Scragg now, he joined us in discord for some help. More things had broken since the server thing.

Rock and roll! Tyty for the update

Hurray! Thank you for the update and your hard work!

here's hoping the Nov update tomorrow won't break things up even more. Sad thing is it was probably just a code cleanup for SE they postponed in forever, like "hey we have all these servers that don't exist anymore, let's update this list of it and enum mapping..." I doubt they would even imagine it would break so much of what users still rely on.

Any updates?

I've updated multiple threads at this point sorry. I don't have them to link... Just know Scragg has been hard at work in the last week.

It's fixed! Thank you to all that helped get it working, you rock!

nice, nice , and More niceness

Thx for you guys and your hard works !

Only REMAs are updating for me, master jobs, job levels and crafts are still on the old status.

Nothing is updating for me still, with /gw flush not doing anything as usual.

I was just notified that Guildwork and FFXIAH had a breach of passwords. It said both my passwords were compromised. FYI.

I just changed my info. I'd recommend that to everyone.

What was the source of this information?