Thottbot and Wowhead, two of the most popular WoW database sites, have been having a few problems with ads lately. There was that brief issue with the trojan in a banner last month, and also apparently some rather irritating ads with flashing and sound have been showing up lately (and I think we can all agree that ads with sound are evil). But, like much of the Internet, these sites are kept free for us because they are ad-supported, so what can they do? Well, they've gone on advertising strike.

Gamers on the Street logs onto U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.

When you can't log in to World of Warcraft, do you get your fix from game sites instead? Gamers on the Street visited with two chatty young players from Zul'jin this morning about their WoW reading and research habits. Deathrowcame (70 Undead Warlock) and Docevil (70 Undead Rogue) were both on alts when we met up, but both popped over to Orgrimmar on their 70s to finish our conversation and take a group shot, as well as to share a few tidbits about life on Zul'Jin.

Be sure to drop by the comments at the end of the article and share your own favorite sites and sources.

Gamers on the Street: Hi guys, thanks for sharing. We're curious about people who like to read and research their characters and game info a lot. Are you both the studious type?
Deathrowcame: Yeah, I am. I got a 70 'lock that I bought, so I have to research it – no, I'm joking,. LOL
Docevil: I read up on what abilities I can get and what the easiest specialization is to use to level.
Deathrowcame: I surf wowhead and thottbot daily to research gear for my level and class and what quest my class should do.

Yes, it's only midnight, and already the wackiness has started. These people just couldn't wait to do something a little silly on the first day of April.

• Reader Tim let us know that Baron Soosdon has quit his job at Machinima.com and stopped making machinima in general. He's said goodbye with (what else?) a Linkin Park video.
• WoWWiki has apparently switched places with the Guild Wars wiki, and vice versa. Make sure to check out their news section, where they mix up Guild Wars news with WoW news. Have you heard about the CM leaving, or the upcoming sequel?
• Wowhead's site, as you can see above, looks strangely familiar (thanks to everyone who sent this in).

More to come for sure. Don't believe anything you read today (unless you read it here on WoW Insider, of course).

Cloth is like the gathering profession for everyone. You don't have to pay to pick it up, and there are no skills to level. Because of the sheer number of tailors, the amount of cloth tailoring eats up (not to mention first aid), cloth gathering can be a lucrative pass-time. Failing that, it can provide for your own cloth needs without having to hit the auction house.

This week's Insider Trader will be going in-depth into the world of farming for cloth, and tackling the following issues:

• The best areas to farm the cloth you need.
• How to alleviate some of the boredom.
• Ways to make the most out of your farming stints.

We will also be covering cloth that can be obtained by even level ones, and not just level 70s, as well as information about what it is used for, and who is going to want it.

• Linen cloth. (lvl 1-15)
  
• Wool cloth. (lvl 14-30)
  
• Silk cloth. (lvl 28-40)
  
• Mageweave cloth. (lvl 38-50)
  
• Runecloth. (lvl 50-62)
• Netherweave cloth. (lvl 58-70+)
• Felcloth. (lvl 50-60).

Whether your career hinges on stacks of cloth or you're looking to finance your other exploits, you won't want to miss this week's guide.

You'll want to be a bit more cautious when looking up information on the game today. World of Raids reports that an unknown ad banner appearing on Wowhead, Thottbot, and Allakhazam has an embedded keylogger trojan. You don't even need to click on the banner, apparently, simply mousing over it will be enough. Wowhead says that all they know for sure is that it originates from "ad.yieldmanager.com", and will produce a redirect to "xpantivirus.com." They're working at isolating it.

The issue is known, and all parties involved are tracking it down, so it should hopefully be resolved soon. In the meantime, if you're looking for a quick way to protect yourself, I would follow the recommendation of World of Raids, and try out the Firefox web browser and the No Script extension. As long as you keep the scripts blocked, it should prevent the banner in question from forcing itself on you. This should also provide you with some protection if you accidentally click on the wrong link elsewhere, such as on the WoW general forums.

Edit: Apparently, the virus in question is not an actual keylogger, but it still does a number on your system, which is reason enough to try to avoid it.

You may remember that earlier this summer, when Affinity Media purchased Wowhead (to add to their acquisitions of Thottbot and Allakhazam), we were able to interview Affinity Media CEO John Maffei, and he told us, in a very roundabout way, that Affinity and IGE had supposedly parted ways-- Affinity and its content sites were, he said, no longer associated with the company that sold gold in World of Warcraft. However, if you read the comments on that interview, you may have doubted what Maffei told us, and now, thanks to legal documents surfacing because of a legal action against IGE, it appears you were exactly right: Affinity and IGE are (or were, according to Affinity Media) still two peas in the same pod (see Update).

I know for certain right now that some of you commenters are preparing the "aww geez, not this again" (NSFW) macro to post, and I don't blame you. You're exactly right; this is boring business stuff, not new news about the Sunwell, and anyone paying attention back during the Wowhead acquisition knew that the two companies were still connected anyway. If this isn't news you to, fine-- I don't mean to reopen Pandora's Box, we just want to make sure we do due diligence in covering this issue.

Andrek posted an interesting thought on the forums: remember loot drama? Sure, there's still loot drama floating around-- as long as there is more players than loot at each boss drop, there will always be loot drama. And maybe this is just nostalgia rearing its ugly head, but it seems like Andrek is right-- Molten Core was home to far more loot drama (Rogue weapon! No, Warrior weapon! No, Hunter weap!) than Outland's raids have been.

There's a few reasons for this. As players note later in the thread, Blizzard is much, much better at itemization now than they were back when we were raiding Ragnaros. And we're all in 10 and 25 man groups rather than 40 man-- fewer people means fewer arguments about who gets what. Not to mention that there's so much more loot now (and so many more ways to get it), that even if you lose that roll to a Hunter, you still get Heroic badges to turn in, or you've still got your Arena rating to count on.

It seems like loot actually means a little less now than it used to, and that's a great change. It's too bad that the old "hunter weapon" joke might actually be becoming obsolete, but less loot drama means more fun, and no guildleader will argue with that one.

Hunter's Mark has a terrific series up that's a great resource for anyone playing this game, not just Hunters. It's called "Being a Know-it-all Without Knowing it All," and if you've ever wondered where to go, what to do, or how to make your character better, reading through the series will give you access to pretty much every tool available online to figure out what's what.

None of it is really new (it's definitely not news that Wowhead and Thottbot exist), and if you read our little site frequently, you're probably very familiar with what all these resources have to offer (we're pretty thorough like that). But if you know someone who's looking for a little more insight on the game, or want a general overview of everything that's available and what each site can offer you, this is it. From the Loot Lists to Bosskillers, tons of information about everything you need to know in World of Warcraft is online, and the Know-it-all series is a great overview of what's what.

[ via Mania's ]

Apparently when Wowhead's million dollar sale hit the news, other website folks paid attention. First WoWDigger announced their bid to get in on the action, and now another site, Lootables (tipped to us by Birgitte, one of the creators), is going to give making an item database a go.

My first reaction was "who needs another one?" but after messing around with the site for a few minutes, it doesn't look half bad. You've got your standard item search, and one feature there I've never seen on other sites is the ability to do searches by what drops in each dungeon-- yes, on Wowhead and Thottbot, you can look up dungeon bosses to see what they drop, but whenever I'm trying to figure out what instance to run, the first thing I do is check WoWWiki to click on each of the boss names in one place and see what they drop. Having everything in the dungeon at a glance is pretty nice. (Update: Wowhead can do this) The other big item of note is that Lootables actually links to each of the other databases in its listings. I didn't see a place to put comments (which are a huge draw on the other databases), but considering all the comments about the item are just a few clicks away, maybe they decided they didn't need them. You can also use the colored boxes near each item to "store" it in a dialogue on the right sidebar, and the site remembers what items you put there, so item comparison is super easy. Very nice feature.

And the last thing I noticed that separates Lootables from other databases is that they've actually created leveling guides for all the professions, complete with links to all the recipes and items you need. Creating an item listing is one thing, but showing clearly how to use those items is definitely helpful.

Birgitte also said she was looking for feedback, so if you guys have it, let's hear it. The only real suggestion I have is to come up with some way for us to see the items-- so far, the best these databases have all come up with is to use user-submitted pictures, but surely there must be some way to both avoid legal pitholes with Blizzard and show us what the items look like.

I sure thought Thott had given up putting new features on his site (since things haven't changed in so long), but apparently not-- just the other day, he introduced Thottbot 3.10, including a new "scoring system," which is customizable so that you can determine for yourself just which weapons you want.

Basically, every item now has a score associated with it, and that score is based on a number of different qualities, including base stats, armor, gem slots, resistances, spells, combat ratings-- anything that you'd ever associate with an ingame item. And then (and here's where it gets really cool), you can even change those score ratings yourself-- if having mp5 on a certain item is hugely important to you as a Shaman, for instance, you can add value to the mp5 stat, which will give those items a higher score. And custom score settings can even be turned into a permalink, which means players can easily trade their own custom scoring sets with each other. Incredibly powerful little feature.

And Thott's added some awesome Javascript features to the listings as well-- you can now customize listed displays of items much more than ever before, and since it's done with AJAX, browsing loads faster as well. Really amazing job.

Now ever since Thottbot and Wowhead moved under the same banner, players have said they wanted them to stay separate. But if this is the kind of thing we're going to be seeing coming out of these sites, bring it on-- I'd love to see the score feature brought into Wowhead's interface, and I'm sure a lot of people would love to use their same scoring profile on both sites to see what kind of information they can dig up.

I was actually running Wailing Caverns with a few guildies from IctfB on last Friday night around midnight when I heard the news: Wowhead had sold for $1 million to Affinity Media, the company that supposedly ran IGE, the notorious goldsellers. We'd received a tip from someone who claimed he used to work for IGE, and we rushed to get the story up and also make sure it was right-- word was that Affinity didn't own IGE any more, and that Wowhead had maybe sold because of that.

Still, in the week or so since, players have had plenty of questions. Did Wowhead sell out to goldsellers? Did Affinity really sell IGE and are they really out of the goldselling business? And why did Affinity want to buy yet another database when they already owned both Allakazham and Thottbot? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of changes would come for Wowhead?

WoW Insider got a chance to sit down for an exclusive chat with both John Maffei, president of the ZAM content network at Affinity Media, and Tim Sullivan, CEO of Wowhead, to talk about Affinity's past, the sale of Wowhead, and what's coming next. They wanted to clear up questions, and we wanted to get answers. To read the full, exclusive interview, click the link below.

How many times a day do we all search Thottbot, Allakhazam, WoWWiki, Wowhead and others? It gets old really fast to type in the address or go dig it out of bookmarks every time right? About 50 of you are right now thinking, "geez ya noob, like thottbot is my homepage!"

Before you get all huffy and start chargin' your fireball, realize that there is a better way to look-up those [ACME Pauldrons of the Whale]. Think of them as WoW UI add-ons for Firefox. What? That's right, IRL WoW add-ons for your Firefox browser. Check out these search plug-ins that you may get some use out of if you look up things like a banshee. By the way, I've heard that Lady Sylvanas can Google stuff like nobody's business, but that is unconfirmed as of this writing.

Firefox search plug-ins for WoW
-WoW Armory (both US and EU versions)
-Allakhazam Quests
-Allakhazam Items
-Allakhazam Mobs
-Curse gaming add-ons
-WoW Official forums
-WoWWiki
-Wowhead
-Wowdirectory

The links to all of these search engines are at Mozilla's "mycroft" website, which lets users build their own search plug-ins for their favorite sites. For any of the search plug-ins, simply click the name of the site you wish to install, and Firefox does the rest.

Our very own search plug-in
Also, I am proud to introduce the official WoW Insider Firefox search plugin that you can now download for your WoW Insider perusing pleasure (without having to type the address or leave your browser). Please use this plug-in responsibly, no members of the Burning Legion are allowed to use this search. Enjoy

Just in case you were worried that all the comments you had put into Thottbot were gone, don't be. We've heard from the man himself and everything is going to be fine.

In an email, Thott says "Some of the back end stuff lost its mind and kept reporting threads as non-existent. The site calmly accepted this and created a new thread start each time someone posted a comment. Now there are multiple thread starts for each page. Once I write something to merge them all it'll be back to normal."

Great to hear that one of the best WoW resources on the Internet is safe and secure. Where else could you learn how Goblin Rocket Fuel can lead to online romance between an engie and an alkie? (second comment)

Sometime today, it seems as though the comments on Thottbot.com were wiped. Maybe. Some Thottbot entries, like this one for Atiesh, have plenty of old comments still on them. But others which definitely used to have comments, like the Bad Mojo Mask, seem to be wiped clean.

Which is definitely trouble, because while there are a lot of WoW resources out there, Thottbot was well known not only for its completeness (they even had spells in there that were only used by NPCs or objects), but for the player comments on each quest. Not only could you find out where a mob spawned, but you could see players telling you how hard it was, how they had beaten it with their 49 lock by chain fearing, and whether the rewards were good or bad. Without the comments, Thott's just not Thott.

There's a few rumors floating around as to why this happened-- it could just be a server mistake, or it could be an attempt by Thott to clean out the gold sellers that were advertising in the comments. Some of the comments may have disappeared and come back, so it could be just a temporary thing (unfortunately the site news doesn't provide any clues because... it was wiped, too). I've dropped a note to Thott himself to see if he can give us any feedback on the subject-- I'll let you know if we hear any more

So if you've ever used Thottbot in the past, now's the perfect time to give back-- leave a comment on a few quests or items you know well to help rebuild the database. I'm sure a site like WoWHead would love to take advantage of Thott while they're down, but Thott's the first and original. I would hate to see them go down like this, especially if it's a tech mistake of some kind.

Update: Comments are now back on the Bad Mojo Mask entry, as well as on the site news. Whatever the problem was, it looks like it might have been only temporary.

Over the last week, it seems like we've done a lot of complaining around here. We've dealt with noobs, kids, and terrible groups. And yet through it all, a lot of good advice has come from you, our readers. So to wrap up a week of complaining about bad players, here's five different ways you can make sure you're a good player.

1. R-e-s-p-e-c-t. If there's one thing a bad player does often, it's disrespect other players. WoW is a game where you're meant to play together well, and that's not going to happen when you ask a warlock for a portal, and then get angry when he can't do it (see #3 about that). Yelling at people (a.k.a. using all caps when you speak), assuming help, ninja-ing loot or resource nodes-- these are all signs of disrespect. Blizzard has built all sorts of benefits into helping people in this game, so chances are if someone isn't doing something for you, or isn't helping in some way, it's because you haven't given them the respect you should.

2. Help yourself first. If no one can help you, don't just get angry about it-- help yourself. If you can't find out what do to for a quest, look on Thottbot. If no one wants to run an instance, find something else to do, watch the LFG channel, and before you know it, somebody will be looking for exactly the thing you wanted to do. If you really, really need 1g, just step out of town and kill a few things until you get it-- I'm not kidding, money is just lying around on dead guys in Azeroth. WoW is a great game in that you can't lose-- no matter how broke or low level or low geared your character is, there's always a way for you to get better, even without anyone's help.

3. Know the game. Everyone says this, but everyone says it because it's true. There are countless resources out there to help you play your class-- read at least a few of them. If someone does something you've never seen before, nicely ask them about it, and they'll probably talk your ear off about all the stuff they can do. And if you're in an instance and you're about to fight a boss you've never fought, let your group know so they can fill you in on what to do during the fight.

4. No begging. This falls right in with #1, but it's worth repeating. In life or in Azeroth, don't beg. There are always better ways to get what you want (see #2).

5. Relax and keep an open mind. One of the biggest complaints this week was about people who were angry because one of the other players wasn't doing something they thought was right. Warriors dual wielding with daggers?!? Druids tanking instances?! Priests pulling!? And yet all of these things aren't just possible-- sometimes they're the best way to do what you need to do. Don't get angry just because someone isn't sticking to the cookie cutter classes-- if everyone lives, it works. And even if everyone doesn't live, don't freak. Wiping, leaving a group, even a huge repair bill doesn't equal the end of the world (that's for when the Burning Crusade shows up).

There we go, a constructive end to a week of complaining. And if someone doesn't follow one of these rules, you can send them right back here to find out where they went wrong.