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.

Yet another celebrity has confessed to being a WoW player. Curt Schilling, the pitcher whose famous game 6 stand against the Yankees in 2004 helped lead the Red Sox to their first World Series championship in eons, plays Hordeside on Malfurion.

In an interview with Allakhazam, Schilling outed Wyndwraith, his 70 orc hunter, and Ngruk, his tauren shaman. He describes himself as a hardcore raider who loves questing. He plays WoW from hotel rooms when he's on the road, and he has recently struggled with the hardcore vs. casual conundrum. Schilling also talks about his own gaming companies, Everquest memories, and the (non) stigma of video games in today's world.

It's always nice to see a well-known, successful person that plays WoW admit it to the public. It helps break down the stereotype that gamers are all basement-dwelling virgins. One question for Mr. Schilling -- do you still have your epic [Bloody Sock]?

[Thanks for the tip, Calaf!]

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

You've done all that work to get your gear, and now you've got to show it off, right? Get a forum signature that shows you're a real hardcore player-- get a player profile. Here's three sites that let you do it for free.

• CTProfiles.net is from the makers of CTmod, and they have a pretty nice interface that will let you put any gear you want in there. They even let you put in different gear profiles for the same character (to show off your fire resist or PVP set, assuming it differs from the stuff you wear all the time). Their interface is good, but none of it is automatic-- you'll have to choose your gear piece by piece as you put it in.
• Allakhazam has a very nice profile listing over on their site that's much more automated-- you create an account, and then install a mod called WoWReader that pulls all of your info out of the game for you. It'll even let you connect up to your guild and server, and they'll calculate all your crit percentages for you from your gear and stats. The only problem is that, like CTprofiles, there's no way to show your PVP rank at all, which means if you want to do that you'll have to go to...
  
• WoW Guru, which has the most complicated profile format out of these three. After you install their addon, they'll show off everything from your Lifetime HKs to your "Expected Peak Rank" (based on your honor rate), and even a little graph that charts your progress so far. Unfortunately, players are commenting that WoW Guru can be kind of buggy (not surprising, considering everything they're pulling together), but they definitely offer the most detailed profile we've ever seen.

Any experience using these? Or do you know of a great profile creator you can recommend?

Update: A few people are also praising RPG Outfitter in the comments, so that's an option, too.