Make an API so plugin writers can access things like Deneb stats and Race stats without crawling the vo web page and causing an extra load on your server.

there's a million ways to implement such a thing so I'll just leave it at that... but I was taught that it was tacky to crawl someones page repeatedly like some plugins I found are doing. Having a low bandwidth API would be more appropriate.

+1

It was discussed and stuff in the past, and although the developers never seemed to mind the odd scrape if done with consideration, some kind of API where they could rate-limit when the server is otherwise busy (like after an email shot) could be better all around?

I dunno, I don't like scraping the pages any more than the next man, but yeah, there really is no other way to get some of that information, and I'm not sure all the information gathered by these plugins was even meant to be available generally (charid's and the likes).

If I was a betting man, I would wager that in the long term plan it will not matter anyway, as a lot of the account management stuff seems to be migrating to the client, and if more things follow like I guess they will, then maybe that information will be available to the plugins directly.