Deleted characters, items, and guilds

From what I can tell, guilds are never actually deleted.  I suspect items are not either, but I could be wrong.

Characters, however, are from what I can tell.

I think it's fairly reasonable to cache for a day or even a week character data on a guild roster site, and I am wanting to cache all character data.  However, there is no easy way to refresh this data and find deleted characters from what I can tell.  I suspect this is not a design considration originally since it was never envisioned anyone would want to do what I am doing today.

I could see several ways about this.  One would be to store the deleted characters with a "deleted" flag, and just return the id and deleted flag.  That seems strange and gross to me.  Another would be to have a way to request characters deleted using some criteria, probably "deleted since <x> timestamp" and a way to walk that list.  That would be a growing collection of course, but from what I can tell it would not be huge, and perhaps not kept for long -- a few months of history should suffice.

--Quicktiger

 

These are good ideas, Quicktiger.  

Characters are deleted by a message from the game.  Having them be marked as "deleted" may be a good plan.  We'll have to think deeper about it to make sure that we get things right.

I did talk to Zoltaroth about updating guilds more often.  We'll work on that next week (I hope).

-dan