Return of the Revenge of the Community Policing and Naming Policy Argument: The Addon

You might recall, if you've followed WoW Insider in the past few months, that I've been a relatively strong advocate of the making sure naming and RP server policies are enforced and have felt that if the community's going to be made to it, we should get better tools for the job. While I even got in a very productive conversation with Belfaire about it, I'm not holding my breath on a lot of my proposed tools and reforms seeing the light of day. After all, I work for WoW Insider, not Blizzard itself, and hey, not everyone agrees with me on how this stuff should work. Which is cool. Variety is the spice of life and all.

That said, for policy reporting curmudgeons like myself, Wachunga of the Maelstrom server has created a pretty good tool: the NameViolation addon.

Essentially, it creates an easy right click interface for reporting naming violations, which was pretty much exactly what I've always wanted, or at least as close as you can get to it in a player-made addon. When you right click your target or a name in the chat window or a who list, one of your options will be "Name Violation." Clicking on this will further allow you to choose the type of naming violation from a list.

Once you have a good list of names built up, or feel like it's time for you to file your report, you go to the ticket interface and copy and paste the information in the box, which is a nicely formatted list of the names you chose and the reason they violate the policy, as well as a note informing the GM that you don't need to be contacted. Tweak it a bit if you need to, then file the ticket. It's the type of system I'd like to actually see in game, myself. Like I've said before, if you're going to make me carry a nightstick and a badge and be a deputy police officer to see that your server policies are enforced, at least make it a bit easier on me!

Thanks, Wachunga, for making something like this. I hope you don't mind me saying that I hope Blizzard puts you out of a job by putting something like this in the base UI some day. It's actually a compliment, I swear!