Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on a "small" website which allows users to enter their professions and offers a nice and easy search option to get found.
Seeing that 95 out of 100 realm forums in EU and DE have stickied threats which are completely crowded, hard to update and in many cases already deserted by their creators it was finally time to do something - properly.
I´m not much into the US forums except for some short glimpses, but I strongly assume you guys have those posts all over the place as well.

Before talking any further:
WoW Crafts - Home
Registering is disabled currently because I am still not 100% done but you can, and it would really help me a lot, use the account:
Login: Conspiracy
Password: test123
(already has a couple of accounts on it)
Note: Page might bug for short moments as it's currently being worked on.

A bit into detail:
Languages German and English supported right from the start.
Quick character creation(this only takes you 5 clicks)
Names are checked via Armory right on creation.
Each professions talents have been sorted out so you don't get a list of 400 useless ones.
All talents have JS mouseovers with allakhazam texts so you know what it does.
"Raid crafts", requiring Heart of Darkness, Nether Vortex and similar have been branded so you can find em quicker or ignore em faster.
This also applies to the search where you can simply filter them out.
Resistance gear has been moved to the bottom of the lists for clean filtering.

What you cannot see at the moment if you´re using the English version:
Guild management, allowing you to create a guild on a server - thus adding some credibility to users and especially Alt-characters.

Currently in the works and preview in the German version:
Character search with Ajax. Guild Search with Ajax. A quick talent search with Ajax.
Adding Spanish and French names as well as mouseovers is not that much of a problem in the long run.

I added Boethius as example to the account, just to note that.
You are free to create characters on the account and check the features and i´d be happy if you do so. If you are "just" interested in the sorted item list this page is using, try the Search function on the "Aegwyn EU" server(with/without raid crafts) - all 7 professions were added there.

And ye, I'm thankful for feedback

When did EJ become the place to beta-test your new web app? Ah well, I'll play ball...

1) Why would my real name be required to register?

2) I'm an engineer/tailor, does your site validate recipes so that I cannot add Flask of Supreme Power to my craftable list? What if I was Alchemy (skill = 290)?

3) Just a suggestion, instead of looking up arcane/fire/shadow etc gear on wowhead and then cross-checking it with your site, I'd like to be able to search for "Arcane Resist Gear" etc. and have it output a list of AR gear (perhaps also add selectable armor types), with the respective crafters.

1) Its a premade form, those drop out anyway (and register is disabled atm)
2) You cannot add recipes without checking that profession.
Also on detail pages names are linked with armory so players can crosscheck they professions and the kill level.
And if you add a profession you dont have, players will see that anyway on the armory.
It´s a bit harder in fact to get the right professions from armory and cross check the skill value.
I tried to make scamming hard, but its always a little self caution left.
3) Thats another nice thing ye, but its a bit harder to make

As for the beta testing, id agree to half but good wow page need some feedback from wow players, designing such a page on my personal thoughts as EU/EN gamer and asking DE and US players to use it ain't a great idea imho.

Thanks for the questions

This is actually a really cool idea. It would be nice to eliminate our huge forum thread on our realm forums that is about half maintained by a busy guildy. Very nice!

A couple of suggestions:

1. You need a cleaner, simpler URL, no one is going to remember the one you have currently.

2. On the front page, instead of putting the latest site news put the search box or a recently updated/added profile list and a search box. Generally no one wants to see site news or change logs.

Definitely a cool idea though.

Its going online on www.wow-crafts.eu ye
There would be a load of additions possible like WTB/WTS pattern posts, blackboards and such but thats definitely something to look into later on.

we use profession.clan-hdlx.de for quite some time. Its only for EU frostmourne and in german though. All in all a very good solution to look things up especially as people can update their profile. Good luck with your page!

The first trial entry I got was a level 10 that claimed to have every alchemy recipe. Is it possible to filter a person if their professions are different than their armory? Can you filter out people by level?

I would also suggest a rating system like Thottbot and WoWhead. That way people won't have to look at every persons armory just to verify they can indeed make whatever they say they can. I would recommend that if you do this, you enable people to vote without signing in.


What about adding a crafting fee? or a comment section?

I also think you'll run into problems as people are going to quit or change professions. The more that this happens, the more unreliable your information is. The rating system would help, like I mentioned earlier. But you are going to need some work around for this.

This is a really tiny thing, but as most of us know, the vast majority of WoW players are stupid. If possible, use a .com instead of a eu. People will tend to forget.

Hope this helps

The idea behind bookmarks is very simple. I suggest you start looking into using bookmarks for the links you like to visit often or plan to visit

Regarding the thread a nice idea good luck with the site

Ye, added a level 10 char as quick example.

The profession grab from Armory is the simpler part, the voting in itself is a nice thing I thought of as well but it´s way harder to realize in the long run.
The "scam" marking of someone itself ain't hard - but making it so the scam report has to get verified or denied is a lot of programming.(Ebay style for example)

In game it's as hard to verify if someone has the profession or not - but what do you trust if you're not in a big guild or your big guild doesn't have the enchant?
Someone with "known" guild tag?
Someone you got referred to?
It´s a lot of background thinking involved in that, and different people prefer different methods

But the feedback is really nice, some more stuff to tweak out.

Few suggestions.
I'd like to be able to pick my server, profession, and just type in a keyword. I don't really want to see every item/enchant everyone can do.


Possibly put the crafter's name in a tooltip on the results page. This way you don't have to go 'in' to each item to see who can do it.

There are many many lazy people in the world who don't make a bookmark until they've been to a site five million times. I know this because I'm one of these people. While it would be nice if everyone bookmarked things right away, the reality is that there are a lot of people like me out there.

An address that's easy to type/remember will get more traffic than one that isn't.

Since the EU Professions forum and the Blizzard Community poster punished me with a blue post and a news I'm updating this here also .

Characters are checked on creation and change on level >= 60 and if they have the proper professions(no talent level!) according to the Armory.
Guild management is online, not working 100% yet though.
Search has been refined, needs some more looking into it as well.

Next thing on the list is adding the character and guild pages, adding links where they should be and minor fixes - then i´ll see about the rest.

And keep it coming

Wow! Fabulous idea. I love it. Although, I do agree about the easier-to-remember site name. Hopefully the one you've selected is easy enough to remember for most US users.

I will be forwarding the players on Skywall US to your site as soon as it is up and running. Can't wait to see it completed!

Nice language selector you have there.

Might I suggest you add alchemy specializations?

If there are two people in your guild with Flask of Might Restoration, it would be useful to know if one is an elixir master and one is a transmute master.

With recipes requiring BoP components such as Nether or Vortexes, it would be nice to have the amount the crafter will charge if
a) you supply all mats apart from Nether
b) crafter supplies all mats

@sathran
That's one pretty sweet post i´ll look into tomorrow but:
Consider switching the "Faction" selector from a dropdown to a pair of radio buttons, and the "Raid Craft" dropdown to a checkbox, to speed up the process of filling out the form.

I added a faction "Both" so people can check cross faction as well by default - results page allows you to sort by faction anyway and you´ll get results that way even if you only fill out server and profession.
And i added raid craft so people can filter a little - at least the common player does not need raid crafts to be displayed by default or like the Jewelcrafting list would just make you howl.

But ye, depending on peoples preferences i might adjust a little

This applies to pretty much all input even if it's not an edit box, if you have any sort of data going from the users browser to your client it shouldn't be trusted. If you expect a number make sure it's a number, if it's only suppose to be 5 characters long make sure it's only 5 characters, even if it's something like a drop down box you should be sure the value you get is actually the one you want.


If you implement a forget password kind of feature, make sure the ID given is unique and can't be guessed the easiest solution is make it millisecond time + a random number, just passing the current time or an incrementing ID is easy to hack.

Indeed, data validation is extremely important.

If you can use bind parameters (as in the oci8 / oracle XE php libs) you can soften variable parsing a bit, focusing only on removing any markup elements and data integrity / type matching.

There are to ways two query a DB, using bind variables and the wrong way. :P

Made some slight adjustments from your input.
Page online at WOW Crafts - Startseite now.
Test users are still up, adding a new feature to the whole thing on monday i hope.

Well thank god I read your post before going to test out the site, since I musing about making a character named ';DROP DATABASE just now.

As for reports, bug or otherwise:

1. If you reselect English as your primary language on the main page, then press the large black Login button on the top navigation bar (as opposed to the orange side bar) it reverts back to German.
   
   
2. I don't understand what the check box is for on the character creation page or the character Data tab, as it has no label. I also don't understand what the orange asterisk signifies next to Profession on the Data tab.
   
   
3. As iterated by other posters, specialization information and Nether/Vortex pricing per crafter would be greatly appreciated. I know I get a few whispers a day asking for Bracers of the Green Fortress, and then they flip out when they can't get me to combine it for 25 gold (because that's a great tip!).
   
   
4. "Talent Search" would probably be more intuitively called "Item Search" in English.

The site looks pretty outstanding so far, though. I look forward to guild support, and being able to actually use it when it goes live.