Addon developers - opinions requested for Jamba character online checks.

[Jafula]

I could define a default channel for Jamba, with an option to override it with the name of another channel should the default channel get hijacked.

Glad to hear you've (almost) got it working. I would still force the channel to be user-entered, as more than one boxer on the same faction and realm will interfere with one another. Or maybe make the channel be Jamba-<MASTERCHARNAME> and the user just enters the master toon in each client as they do now.

No need to force the channel to be user entered (it will be an option). There are no messages sent on the channel.

Basically, I just check the channel to see who is in it. If any of those toons are in Jamba's toon list, then they must be online. If they are another boxers toons, Jamba will just ignore them as they are not in the list. And if you were a malicious boxer and entered someone else's toons name in your list; those toons would ignore your commands as your toons will not be in their list.

Channels fire an event for joining / leaving which I catch and update toon status as appropriate.

Also masters can change in Jamba, so creating a channel with the masters name could be problematic. I believe, that some users run Jamba with self as master as well (even in a team).

It probably gets too far away from the direction you want to go in, but I ended up building a "white list" which was separate from friends / guild for similar reasons (wanted to not rely on in friends/guild list). One of the things I had wanted to do was when you'd type in a name to add to the list, it would "who' them to ensure that only valid names were in the list. But this failed for me as it turns out that every option I tried required the target toon to be online for it to know about them, or worse, as you've seen, in the party/raid.

In the end, the best option may end up being to figure out a good triggering event and loop through your team setup as someone else already suggested.

I'm glad they lock down WoW LUA so folks can't cheat / write hostile addons, but sometimes when I want to do something benign like this, I end up pounding my head on my desk. Some of the suggestions here HAVE given me some ideas for completely unrelated stuff though. muwwwa haah hahha (evyl laugh).

The channel solution works very well. I've been at this problem since August 2008 (on and off); and this is the nicest yet. A character logs off and my other characters know immediately; (see the screenshot for the Jamba 0.5 UI in the main Jamba thread).

I like that this conversation has sparked some ideas for you.