I have returned from the great north woods, but have not had much time to work on this site much. I've been busy with other things like XNA 4 and windows phone 7 type stuff.

I have been waiting for my hosting provider to add asp.net 4.0 support but it may be a wee bit before that happens so the new site is still waiting to be set free. Also I have not been downloading character stats from the armory either because it takes a very long time and I am planning on changing my approach to the site.

As it is up until now my approach has been to download the entire Sisters of Elune character roster once a week. About 40,000+ characters give or take. But this introduces problems with the amount of storage required to store that data as well as how to efficiently store it for quick retrieval. I have a working theory that may work better and that looks good on paper but have not implemented/tested it yet.

Instead I have decided not to download the whole SoE character roster every week and finish work on my Wowtracks client downloader application. This application will allow registered users of the site to track any number of characters they wish to and thus the completeness of the data on the site will be the sole responsibility of the community of users that wish to participate.

So if only fifty people use the site and those people only track say 1500+ characters across the various realms, then the site will only have data on those 1500+ characters and no others. If a person visits the site and finds that a character on a particular realm is not being tracked they can choose to register a free account with the site then they can create a list of characters they are interested in tracking. After that they just run the client downloader app and leave it run in the background.

The downloader app will download the users list of characters they are tracking first and when it's done it will attempt to download characters from other users tracking lists, until there are no more characters left to track. Characters will be restricted to only being downloaded by the downloader app once a day. This is by design because multiple users could be tracking the same toons and downloading a toon twice or more in a 24hr time span  is some what pointless.

This makes the site only as good as it's community participation. But like I say if some one wants to participate and donate there time to track 100,000+ characters and let the downloader app run endlessly they can do that to. Even if they have no interest in tracking all those characters but want to help the site anyway.