VIPWatch was another Warcraft III related project I did in 2009 (I think). The idea behind this was to use the available xml lists of authorized banlist members to have a website which indicated whether they were online or not. This isn’t trivial because wc3 provides no way to get this information without being in the game yourself.

My solution was to use JavaOp bot to perform /whois checks on each user, and parse the output and insert into a mysql database on the server. JavaOp was probably the least known chat bot for battle.net, but honestly it was the best by-far. Completely open-source and entirely plugin based, it even had a GUI!. The /whois checks take time to avoid getting kicked for spam, and with some experimentation I created some default settings which will check about 40 people in 10m without getting disconnected.

VIPWatch is the combination of some php for the page and a java plugin to work with the bot in the background to collect information about who is online. I also include a stripped down version of JavaOP and the mysql-connector.

Unfortunately it sort of died with Warcraft III! and I don’t have any more good screenshots.