I have seen a couple of misconceptions in this thread.
First is how Census data can lead to people knowing how many player accounts are active.
Assuming you could get enough client machines doing Census across all realms (at the same time or 24/7) you could come up with oh 50 million characters.
That tells you nothing.
Is it 50 million active accounts, or is it 1 million active accounts, or some indeterminate number in between.
No one in the financial community would even think to use such sloppy data for any planning.
Second is that somehow using /who is a burden on the servers.
Here is how this function works.
First you send a single packet query to the server.
Second the server processes the query until it reaches just 50 results.
Then it send a single packet back to the client.
This is very low resource requirements, the 2nd is the most intensive…
And Blizzard has for a long time had a load preventer built in. If the inbound packet queue gets too high, they just drop the packet and you get no response.
While I can not say I have never seen a dropped query.
I can say I have never seen CensusPlus impacted enough to be noticeable, even when peak loads (Expansion launches for example) were on the servers.
Right from nearly day one Thirteen plus years ago CensusPlus has had a built in delay to keep us from being a load problem, and when Wholib was built to help addons like Wim and others to safely interact on the same client with CensusPlus running that delay was loaded into the library for the same reason.
ClassicCensusPlus will be resurrected some time this year. But it will permanently suffer from resurrection sickness … and run as slow as molasses due to the HW event requirement.
It probably will run so slow that realms with highest active player levels will not get a complete census run during the census takers play session.
The only bright side of this is that gold sellers who often copy pasted much of the core of CensusPlus to make their addons will see the code as worthless.
Though I can already see how they could use the minimum functionality already available through macro key interaction… it just won’t be worth their time.