Heads up WrA! A dev of the addon Altoholic got into a squabble with the dev of TRP3, and as a result, has added a line of code that will PURPOSEFULLY break TRP.
I know a lot of roleplayers use both, so just wanted to let my home server know.
EDIT: The person behind the sabotage is NOT the original creator (Thaoky). It is a mod for the Retail version (Teelo). Thaoky has now revoked Teelo’s rights and asked him to remove his version. There are copious screencaps of Teelo going off on vulgar tirades declaring “war” and deleting comments of people calling out the malignant string of code, so it seems pretty clear that this was an intentional attack on TRP done by a single member of the Altoholic team (if it wasn’t clear already).
As of now, it looks like Altoholic is in safe hands again, and the addon is ok to download. If you’re iffy about it, perhaps give it a week.
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The author of Altoholic has apparently pushed an update to disable the offending lines: https://twitter.com/Solanya_/status/1343019896171593733
I still reported Altoholic as malware, and I’d encourage anyone reading this thread to do so as well. My tolerance for programmer shenanigans is low at the best of times without said programmer turning their work into a trojan on a whim.
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Yeah, even if they went back on it, the fact that they did it in the first place is beyond messed up. I don’t trust the dev anymore.
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The use of mods and addons for any game is a major system of trust between the programmer and the user. You don’t always know what exactly is in the program and you’re trusting the author to not have put anything malicious in the file. The fact this happened is unacceptable. Sincerely hope the author gets their addon taken down and their account banned on whichever platforms offer it. Absolutely unacceptable to breach that trust, especially to weaponize the mod.
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Yea. This deeply saddens me. What does have to gain from this? If anything he just empowered the TL3 author and made them look like the victim here and now he has lots the trust of the public and may be banned. Big big mistake on his or her part.
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Allegedly there are claims it was a lie/a game of telephone that brought about misinformation. I don’t buy it. Several people that had both addons made the other work by turning one off.
And we know which one that was. If this was a true statement by the dev and not someone trying to save the addon, then I guess this is how they wish to try and salvage the situation. I sure hope this wasn’t the addon maker.
Addon makers throwing fits seems like the new trend this season
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I actually just took a look at Altoholoic on CurseForge a few minutes ago. There’s a message on there from the addon’s author that the perpetrator was the person maintaining it for them. There’s a message on there saying they’ve had their rights revoked, the license type is now all rights reserved, and the author is asking the maintainer to take down the addon from their pages. There’s also a screenshot on there showing the offending code.
This was definitely malicious.
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https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/37823216/103165741-36050380-47d0-11eb-9c38-a35032d4dc15.png
This is the screenshot on the AddOn’s page.
On the left is the actual code. The highlighted line is loadstring(), which is a function: code that takes certain inputs and returns an output based on the inputs (for example, sum() is a function that takes a bunch of numbers and returns the sum of all those numbers, so sum(1,2,3) would return 6). A string is the datatype for storing text. In this case, the string was actually numbers corresponding to specific alphanumeric characters (for example, 32 is a space, and 100 is a lowercase d). When passed through the loadstring() function, the series of character codes spelled out, “If AddOn_TotalRP3 then wipe(AddOn_TotalRP3) end”.
Looks like this code was part of a user-defined function called “addon:OnEnable”. I’m not familiar with this syntax, but by context clues alone, I’d guess this means the AddOn executes this code every time it’s turned on.
TL;DR: By “break TRP3”, this code wipes all your profiles every time you log in. (I think.)
Another reminder to regularly back up your profiles, my dudes.
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Thank you! I’m not very tech savvy, you explained it well better than I ever could.
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Me IRL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
EDIT: I forgot this song was 50% love song. I just really mood the “maybe manager wanna write god damn login page himself” line.
EDIT 2 Electric Boogaloo: My manager’s actually cool, but coding is still the bestworst.
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Oh, that’s why it wasn’t working for me yesterday. Thanks for the thread. I spent some time trying to fix it yesterday, but I haven’t the time lately to spend on something like that. It was strange seeing people’s in-game name rather than their RP name. Thankfully, none of my profiles seemed to have been wiped.
I don’t like people that would involve others in their own little petty “revenge”.
This kind of stuff is pretty common in the Skyrim modding community. As someone that usually spends an hour or more just trying to set up simple WeakAuras because I don’t understand simple/basic programmer speak, whenever something like this happens it can really throw me for a loop.
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Good thing I am an add-on minimalist (kinda), I hate petty antics like this though.
On the subject of backups, does anyone know if a character’s TRP3 Extended wearable items/backpack inventory/database is included in the regular TRP profile export? I was updating objects there today and could not find a straight answer.
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Altoholic just stopped working/kept breaking and not tracking things anymore like two or three expansions ago for me. Was a fan of it, then wasn’t.
Sounds like a software issue on your end, it worked fine for me and most people I knew.
shrug emoji
It maintained like… 4 or 5 characters, stopped displaying others, blah blah blah.
Now I just hoard everything on one.
Good for you? Like I said, I don’t know that that was particularly a common issue with modern versions, so I’d imagine that was a bug that was fixed long ago.
Past that, this isn’t really about your grievances with the addon itself. This is about a specific dev for the addon - NOT the main one - who sabotaged a version of it to dick over an addon from someone they had beef with. It sounds like your issues with Altoholic are another thing, relegated largely to your machine.
Good for you? Like I said, I was just making a random throwaway-but-personal weigh-in on the addon that may or may not be relatable for other people and if it is relatable, probably another notch on the “will remove or won’t install or keep using it” belt if the developer of it’s being a wienerschnitzel.
This isn’t a “complain about Altoholic” thread, bud.