For guild leaders the site offers a unique Guild Recruitment tool. It allows anyone with a forum account to register a guild by filling out a simple form and make every detail of it searchable for visitors of the site. The main advantage of this is that visitors can easily filter profiles for their needs. This also means there is no need to bump the profile every day to keep it visible.

The guild leader has full control over the guild profile, they can disable or reactive it, renew it after it was automatically disabled (this is to keep the information fresh). When the profile is disabled only the owner can see it and it is removed from search results, this is to make sure all the information the visitors see is fresh. Visitors can search the guild database with any combination of the following search filters:

A guild profile

• region: US-US, US-Oceanic, EU-English, EU-German, EU-French, EU-Spanish, EU-Russian
• realm name
• battlegroup's name
• realm type: PvP, PvE, RP, RP-PvP
• time zone for US realms
• faction: Alliance or Horde
• guild name
• main raid size: 10 or 25
• raiding hours
• classes and specs: 10 classes and even their 30 specs
• progress including hard mode boss kills and special achievements all WotLK raid dungeons: Eye of Eternity, Obsidian Sanctum, Naxxramas, Ulduar and the Crusaders' Coliseum
• anyone with a forum account can search for guilds that are best suited for them with a single click (based on forum profile information)

And as a bonus feature, every guild with an active profile on Wowraid gets an automatically generated forum signature, that is usable anywhere on the internet and it always shows the latest, most difficult achievement of the guild and it features the classes with an open spot.

For newsers and the general public the site offers 2 tools. The Bluetracker and the Server Alert Tracker.

Bluetracker

The Bluetracker has an average 3 minute update interval and it tracks all of the important US and EU forum boards. There are 3 RSS feeds for your consideration:

• newsblue.xml is the basic RSS containing every bluepost
• specblue.xml contains announcements only, that is all the posts in threads started by blueposters. Posts here aren't cut, threads from the US Service Status forum board are not included. Subscribing to this feed, setting it to the highest update frequency and enabling some kind of desktop alert for posts in this feed is a good way to intercept important news.
• devs_nofluff.xml is a developer-only RSS feed that's based on the Developer filter you can read about in the next list.

The actual files are generated every minute and they hold 50 posts so even with a lower update frequency you won't miss any blue posts.

New blue posts


A thread

Additionally the main tracker page on the site hosts extra features to create news as fast as possible. In the top-right corner of each blue post there is a quote button, which gives the preformated HTML code of that blue post, ready to be inserted into a news item on your site. The embed code consists of a blockquote with a Blizzard logo hosted on wowraid, the blueposter's name, the topic subject, a link to the original source of the blue post on the official forum and the complete post. There is no watermarking or Wowraid reference of any kind.

There are two extremely useful features yet I'd like to point out. Both of them are available in the Bluetracker's main menu

• Announcements: show threads only that were started by Blizzard posters
• Developers: show threads only where actual game developers posted, that means no community managers reposting information or locking threads, no quality assurance guys thanking bug reports. This is the real stuff you should always check. Posters include Daelo, Ghostcrawler, Kalgan, Tigole, Koraa, Kisirani, Valnoth, Mumper and Slouken.

Server Alert Tracking

The Server Alert Tracker is a very basic tool, that is continuously checking the login screen alerts for each game region. You can use it to never miss server issues and ingame announcements even when you can't play the game. Each region has a separate page that shows the current login screen message and its difference with the previous one, as well as a separate RSS feed:

• US
• EU English
• EU French
• EU German
• EU Spanish
• EU Russian

Forum

Obviously all the news published on the website and the full contents of the forum - which usually brings newsworthy items to our attention - are also available in the form of RSS feeds:

• feeds.php - forum threads
• feeds.php?b=1 - news
• feeds.php?posts - forum posts
• feeds.php?b=1&posts - comments made on newsitems

Replace b=1 with any board you wish to follow, you can get its ID from the forum index

Twitter

The Bluetracker and the News are tied into Twitter. In addition to announcements and news, we usually mention guide updates and other semi-important stuff on our Twitter page. Check out our account!

Developers

For developers there are two special XML files, one for the Bluetracker called devblue.xml, and another called latest-guild.xml for Guild Recruitment.

devblue.xml holds posts with detailed information, ideal to create a simple bluetracker interface. It has the following structure using an example:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<posts>

    <post>

        <topic>

                <region>EU</region> <!-- EU or US -->

                <board>Achievements</board> <!-- Achievements, General, Professions, WotLK, Tournament, Raid, PvP, Quest, Damage Dealing, Healing, Tanking, Death Knight, Druid, Hunter, mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior, Service Status -->

                <topic_id>8242774269</topic_id>  <!-- topic id on the official forums -->

                <subject><![CDATA[Remove Red Proto Drake Too]]></subject> <!-- topic subject -->

                <original_poster><![CDATA[<a href="http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Vaiuri" target="_blank">Vaiuri</a>]]></original_poster> <!-- wowarmory html link of the original poster, or the name of the blueposter -->

                <blue_start>0</blue_start> <!-- 0 or 1 -->

                <lastblue>18</lastblue> <!-- post number of the last post in this thread on the official forums -->

        </topic>

        <postnumber>18</postnumber> <!-- post number of this post on the official forums -->

        <time>1235995042</time> <!-- unix time at which this post was made. dont forget that blizzard uses PST -->

        <patch><![CDATA[Patch 3.0.9]]></patch> <!-- live patch version at the time of the post, ptr version on the ptr forums during testing -->

        <poster><![CDATA[Ancilorn]]></poster> <!-- this post's poster's wowarmory html link, or name if blueposter -->

        <postericon>http://wowraid.com/Themes/newdef112/images/tracker/bliz.gif</postericon> <!-- poster's avatar -->

        <text><![CDATA[We're not planning on stopping the Red Drake from being obtainable at present, it's a 310% mount and those are the ones we deem necessary to hinder being farmed when they become 'EZMOAD'.<br><br>We'll let you know if our stance on this changes at any point.]]></text> <!-- contents of the post -->

        <wowraid>http://wowraid.com/tracker/b24/t8242774269/remove-red-proto-drake-too.html#18</wowraid> <!-- wowraid link -->

        <original>http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=8242774269&amp;sid=1&amp;pageNo=1#18</original> <!-- official forum link -->

    </post>

    ...

</posts>

For Guild Recruitment developers have the same information available in 2 formats. latest-guild.xml holds the latest 50 guilds, but it is also available in a standalone, per-guild format, that is accessible by appending /xml to the end of the guild profile page's URL: http://wowraid.com/recruitment/id113/Journey-US-Gilneas/xml. Both of them have the same XML structure, the standalone version doesn't have the guilds root tag and has only 1 guild tag.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<guilds>

    <guild>

        <wowraid>http://wowraid.com/recruitment/id113/Journey-US-Gilneas</wowraid> <!-- wowraid link -->

        <armory>http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Gilneas&amp;n=Journey</armory> <!-- wow armory link -->

        <name><![CDATA[Journey]]></name> <!-- guild name -->

        <realm region="US" subregion="US" type="PVE"><![CDATA[US-Gilneas]]></realm> <!-- realm name. region: EU or US; subregion: Oceanic, US, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian; type: PVP, PVE, RP, RP-PVP; -->

        <raidsize>25</raidsize> <!-- 10 or 25 -->

        <faction><![CDATA[Alliance]]></faction> <!-- Alliance or Horde --> 

        <progress> <!-- this tag and its contents are optional -->

                <obsidiansanctum mode="hard2"><![CDATA[Sartharion killed with 2 drakes alive]]></realm> <!--  mode attribute is always specified if the tag exists for this guild. mode: normal, hard1, hard2, hard3 -->

                <naxxramas bosses="US" achievement="immortal"><![CDATA[The Immortal]]></realm> <!-- bosses attribute is always specified if the tag exists for this guild. achievment tag is optional. bosses: 1-15; achievement: immortal, undying; -->

                <eyeofeternity achievement="sixmin"><![CDATA[Defeated Malygos in 6 minutes]]></realm> <!-- achievement tag is optional. achievement is always sixmin if specified -->

        </progress>

        <classes> <!--  child tags always have spec attribute specified. textcontent shows the number of open spots. spec: no, name of the spec. no signifies a generic class spot. class and spec names are lowercase, whitespace stripped -->

                <deathknight spec="no">1</deathknight>

                <druid spec="balance"">1</druid>

                <priest spec="shadow">1</priest>

        </classes>

    </guild>

    ...

</guilds>