Link to the launcher text

Posted May 21st 2009 5:00PM by Mike Schramm

Just a quick tip for those of who may be stranded at work and thinking about World of Warcraft (which, during the day, is probably all of you?) I've never seen a link to this page (though we've snuck it in some maintenance posts before), but fortunately the good folks at the WoW LJ community have spotlighted it: Blizzard's welcome screen notice is just a text page online, and it's publicly available. So even if you can't load up the WoW client, you can still keep track of realm downtime on maintenance days, or just keep an eye on what Blizzard is posting about lately.

It's a little thing (and truthfully, there's probably not much there that you really need to know anyway -- if you're away from a WoW client, obviously you can't log in even if your realm is back up). But you never know, someday when you're thinking about World of Warcraft, far afield of your installation, and really need to know what Blizzard has to tell you, it could come in handy. Definitely earned a place in my bookmarks, just in case.

And having it in quick and easy online text form means we can script it to go elsewhere, right? Anyone want to try hooking a Twitter account up to this thing?

Tags: blizzard, bookmarks, client, online, page, publicly, realm-status, server-alert, twitter, world-of-warcraft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

j May 21st 2009 5:11PM

"...those of who may be stranded at work and thinking about World of Warcraft (which, during the day, is probably all of you?)"

yes this guy right here!

lol

- dreaming of raids, imagining my rotations, i wanna go home!!!

Ryan May 21st 2009 5:15PM

Wow .... this has been around for soooo long. Do wow.com editors even play WoW?

Discrete May 21st 2009 5:20PM

It seems that many people aren't aware of it, or if they saw it didn't remember it.

Arashikou May 21st 2009 5:28PM

I've been around longer than WoW Insider, and even I didn't know about this until now. Neat!

Ryan May 21st 2009 5:29PM

It seems that many of the blog posts of recent are written in a manner that suggest the authors do not get outside their inbox often enough. They are written in a tone of wonderment over them most mundane information.

Yeng May 21st 2009 5:45PM

"Just a quick tip"...."It's a little thing (and truthfully, there's probably not much there that you really need to know anyway"....

Yeah, i can just see the tone of wonderment dripping from every orifice of this post.

tatsumasa May 21st 2009 6:04PM

assuming that everyone knows something just because you know it, then bashing people for their 'ignorance' is a surefire way to make friends ryan.

Ryan May 22nd 2009 2:29AM

I am not looking for friends, I am looking for good news, unlike the 'good thing we have addons for automatically swapping gear when switch spec' when it can be done in a two line macro (See: Equipment manager and dual talents won't mix) and and a url that has been around since the alert has been in the game.

Discrete May 21st 2009 5:15PM

I've started playing with Rainmeter recently, and I'm definitely going to try to implement this for my work computer! Though maybe it will have to be Samuraize.

Do any of you have a link to the RSS feed for server statuses? If there's one where you pass a particular server, that's preferred. I'm close to seeing if I can find it in the code of updater software that's currently available, but some kind soul may save me the hunt.

Joey May 21st 2009 5:30PM

I actually use the plugin to FireFox called World of Warcraft Realm Status. Lets you see the status of individual realms or specific ones and alerts you in the browser if they are up or down.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1780

Thelanor May 21st 2009 5:52PM

The cool thing about it is that you get any sort of message thats posted. Realm status pages are great when its a simple matter of realms being up/down, but when the authentication servers are down and you don't feel like pulling up the WoW client to check, you can just refresh this page to get an update.

Scyntinth May 21st 2009 6:09PM

http://twitter.com/launcherstatus

I've currently got it running locally...need to move it to one of my servers. Too bad people park twitter names like domain names :(

blkmasta55555 May 21st 2009 6:14PM

Made a twitter account for the EU status using page2rss.com and rsstotwitter.com, no clue if it works or how accurate it is: http://twitter.com/WoWStatusEU

blkmasta55555 May 21st 2009 6:29PM

Theoretically, nothing will show up until the next time the message is updated.

Tormentor May 21st 2009 5:06PM

Does the EU have a page like this?

Ed May 21st 2009 5:13PM

http://status.wow-europe.com/en/alert

That should work, no alert message right now apparently.

Tsaavik May 21st 2009 5:14PM

Here is an rss feed for it.

http://page2rss.com/page?url=launcher.worldofwarcraft.com/alert

Scyntinth May 21st 2009 6:22PM

Changed the account name to mimic blkmasta55555's EU account:

http://twitter.com/WoWStatusUS

elfennau May 21st 2009 8:43PM

You, sir, win.

bum May 21st 2009 6:19PM

http://twitter.com/wowalert_us as well

/agree with Scynthith - no good names out there.

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