I noticed a lot of time on Wowhead, they say they get their info from data mining.
Now I understand (sorta) what data mining is but my understanding is Wowhead would have to have access to WoW’s company systems to be able to ‘mine’ things.
Does Blizzard give them this access? If not, how did they get it?
Oh you checking for someone?
MrGM and other content creators also datamine the game, its a software, if you search google there’s one called DBCViewer, and then you can take the files from the PTR build that you download as part of the PTR testing and you can check 3D models, text, audio from there.
Actually if you check MrGM datamining it’s executed via a web page, wow. tools even easier,
Blizzard prohibits modification of those files but i think they allow that you can open the files via external software, when they don’t want something to be out to the public is encrypted on the files.
First all, thank you very much for replying.
for you!
Oh so, it is not directly from their company files but from the public PTR (yes, I know that’s redundant 
).
So they could stop it all with encryption if they wanted? And the PTR would still run fine?
So anything that ‘gets out there’ is with their unspoken blessing?
They could stop some cinematics,model,dialogues with encryption, but a lot of things are required to run the PTR.
I found this https:// wowpedia. fandom. com/ wiki/Data_mining but i can’t see the post from the blue anymore on the forums.
Ythisens is not longer working as community manager and Blizzard deleted his post. " Caden House, also known as Ythisens, was Assistant Community Manager for the NA World of Warcraft forums at Blizzard Entertainment.
He was introduced to the community by Ornyx on September 26, 2017.
He was laid off on February 12, 2019 as part of a restructuring by Activision Blizzard."
So, practically another issue, when a community manager is fire, Blizzard removes their post 
I found blue post archived on the blue tracker page: https:// www.bluetracker. gg/wow/topic/us-en/20761776002-datamining-and-content-creation/
My only real issue with datamining is some take it as gospel and it might be subject to change.
So anything on PTR needed for functionality has to have it’s files publically available to be mined?
There is no way for Blizzard to secure those files?
Well, that’s stupid.
Thank you. That laid it Blizzard’s stance perfectly.
It’s one of those things that’s hard to stop from a technical perspective. Yes, you can encrypt files, but the game has to be able to decrypt them in order to run the content contained in said files. If you swapped the file format to a proprietary one, there’s enough community motivation that someone will reverse engineer it.
There are games that take place server side only, which slows things down greatly, then games that take place mainly client side. Too much client side can cause problems, as it does in Red Dead Redemption Online, for the PC where modders make ways to interact with it.
So Wow is kind of “in the middle.” That means that they try to control things by mostly keeping them server side but some things still must be interacted with client side.
You can try to keep players from manipulating some things client side, as much as possible, but in the end some things must go client side in order to have the game run as fast as possible.
I just google client side and, while several sites explained how it works, I could not find anything that explained exactly what it is.
Is client side the files on my computer?
Or is it the files on Bllizzard’s system that my computer interacts with, therefore giving me access?