i’m more likely to believe this over the LFG theory. they already rolled out an update to block automatic function of the LFG addon once, so why would they suddenly decide to round 2 when they could’ve easily done it the first time?
a lot websites and misinformation related to the census addon.
Well, yeah - I agree. Instead of letting it go while they are AFK, they’ll need to “man” the spamming toon and just click every 30s or so…
I don’t think it will deter spammers all that much… (if this were the reason why they decided to break this functionality)
FYI, there were a couple of popular threads on the Classic WoW subreddit within the past few days mocking/complaining about auto-guild invite addons. I wouldn’t be surprised if those threads swayed Blizzard’s opinion.
theres already an option in game to completely block those
There is no option in game to completely block automated whispers, no. I think you are mistaken.
It could have something to do with layer hoping. It is odd they broke that after someone illustrated how those different who commands can show people who is in their layer.
I wouldn’t consider that nefarious.
Doubtful. The realm selection screen and the login queue are usually all most players need to see if they’re thinking of moving to greener pastures.
My guess is that this has more to do with breaking layering exploits than with finding dungeon groups or how overcrowded your server is.
Do we know that for sure? Did the ClassicLFG use this particular api?
The server load issue also sounds like a reasonable explanation.
You’re right; it’s not really nefarious. I did use quotes around it, so that’s my excuse for picking that word 
“Subversive” might be closer to what I really mean (tying to subvert users’ ability to see what realms are busy/etc)
Regardless - to me, it just seems odd they would suddenly decide to purposely cripple this sort of addon, after allowing them to work for the last 15 years (and there have always been Census addons for WoW since I can really remember).
Trying to cripple spammers is a more viable reason, IMHO.
Interesting! Do you have a link for that somewhere? I’d like to check it out.
Scan through the other responses, and you’ll see I basically proved that it’s NOT to try to break ClassicLFG, since ClassicLFG doesn’t even really use SendWho() in any manner that would affect its core ability.
I did see that afterwards. Thank you for the investigative work.
It’s not what it does now. It’s what it did originally. Refer to the thread that I linked to read about the controversy. In any case, the add-on’s creator removed the original functionality and it is now a simple chat parser, but Blizzard went ahead with their change to the API so that no one else would create an add-on that will do what ClassicLFG originally did.
I am not sure I even replied to it. I will do a quick search for it but I can’t even really remember the subject heading.
Guess it wasn’t that hard.
How “originally”? I looked at ClassicLFG code from a month ago (v1.0.0, Aug 25, 2019) and it’s the same as the most recent version (v1.0.1, Sept 11, 2019)
I just now grabbed v0.5.1 from Aug 13, 2019 (the first version tagged as “Classic”) and it’s STILL the same (only 1 call, when someone whispers a party leader).
If it was before that time, why would Blizzard wait until NOW to break /who?
I’m pretty sure it has to be for some other reason.
I was wondering why WIM was working differently.
Interesting. I’ll have to play around w/ that, because something seems broken with their entire /who system if the results return “all layers” in some situations, and “just my layer” in others.
Using the example picture they posted, I’d want to see what
/who c-"Hunter" 1-2
returned, to see if it shows only “my layer” hunters (just ‘Snowblood’), or all the hunters from the 2nd pic.
Otherwise, this really looks like something Blizzard could have fixed on their side, by just always returning “all layers”.
You aren’t going to get anywhere. Blue post has a Nostradamus prediction, and now everyone against ClassicLFG can point to any given update that touches add-ons and say “see, this is the one!” (Even if had no impact, much less “significantly limit.”
BTW, it seems blizz fixed the /who discrepancy (and now always returns all players, regardless of layer) ~10 days ago. So… the hotfix last night still doesn’t really make too much sense… unless they were (sadly) truly trying to block addons like CensusPlusClassic. 
cf. Blizzard just hotfixed the ability to detect layers using /who command