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by typomatic 2787 days ago
> Why does WoW allow you to run scripts in your chat window? Who needs that functionality?

The "chat" window in WoW is more like a shell interface/CLI than a pure chat window and it's been that way since the inception of WoW. The mod system is loosely dropped on top of it: basically add-ons in WoW amount to bash scripts.

It's a pretty hacky system that seems like it was made to add modding capability as quickly as possible during development. The fact that such an integral system has never been rewritten isn't hard to believe.
1 comments
danShumway 2787 days ago
I can buy that -- but wouldn't they still at some point want to make the main chat window for the game into some kind of safer wrapper around the bash prompt?

This is coming from someone who doesn't play WoW; is it common for a mod to expose custom commands in chat or something? Or are mods maybe using it as a buffer to send commands?

I guess if they're detecting and popping up a warning prompt, but they're not willing to get rid of the prompt and just always escape the input, there must be some stuff out there that utterly depends on players clicking "allow". That's baffling to me, but I am often baffled.

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Liquid_Fire 2787 days ago
> is it common for a mod to expose custom commands in chat or something?

Yes, it's quite common for mods to expose custom commands, although these are not raw Lua functions but rather "slash commands", e.g. /foo

Other than for messaging/chat, the chat box can also be used for various commands for actions your character should perform, e.g. /wave, /target, /sleep and the game also has a built-in macro system that lets you combine several of these into a "macro" that you can then execute by pressing a single button. But these are all "safe", i.e. they don't eval raw Lua code.

There are some WoW quest-tracking websites that will sometimes give you little snippets of Lua to execute via /run that will e.g. query the game about whether you completed the given quest, but in general normal users shouldn't need to use /run, it's more of a feature for mod developers.

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Bayart 2786 days ago
It's common to interact with UI code and gameplay macros through the text interface.

The system might come off as insecure, but frankly that flexibility added a lot of value to WoW over its lifespan.

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