@mercime thanks for the reply… Yeah I checked that list out but not quite what I wanted.
I ended up going down the stand-alone route but I will be writing plugins for BuddyPress/WoW/Ladders as they will be very useful to myself and probs be of interest to others.
I am also going to write WoW addons also and will have a look at some way to bridge the gap between the WoW API and BuddyPress.
The ladder system has just been deployed at ladder.wowgz.com but there’s still lots of work to be done before any tournaments are held.
I don’t want to come over as all doom and gloom especially as this is my first post but I would think long and hard before adding such a feature. At first glance, many website owners (including some well known ones) think this is a great idea… but, think long and hard about this.
Many users will enter their “real name” when they register. If you add a postcode field (which would be required to add map pins), most users will have given sufficient information to pinpoint them to their front door.
There are many public records that can be data-mined by bots. One of the trends these days is for a bot to trawl the data provided by websites such as those hosted by WordPress (because it is open source, they know exactly what to look for) and then cross-reference that with public information (phone books, Facebook, electoral register, etc… Given a surname and a postcode, this would be enough to allow these bots to start collecting data for possible identity theft.
I have seen many sites (including a well known newspaper) do this without thinking of the consequences but after I pointed this out to them, the feature was removed within a few hours (which is extremely unusual at the best of times). I guess after they contacted their legal advisors, they were told that they faced extreme liability if it were found that this kind of data-mining of their site lead to mass identity theft (particularly after the “phonejacking” fiasco).
Just a thought and all the best for your sites.
-PiOfCube
