Editing Update of the Avatar/Update 227 (section)

===<span id="7">Public Stats API</span>===
[https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/public-stats-api.89186/ &#91;A Forum Post by Robert “Undone” Thompson]&#93;]

As many of you know, we log a great deal of data for internal analysis. For a few releases now we’ve been promising to make some of that data available to the public. But before we could make that happen a pipeline had to be developed to automatically sanitize the data of any sensitive information. All of the infrastructure is finally in place and we’re ready to open it up to the public.

HOWEVER, you should first understand what this API is, and what it is not. @Chris summed it up nicely in a [https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/chris-daily-work-blog.85584/page-2#post-807548 recent post on his work blog]:

Chris said:

:''This is not intended for the average user to use. Instead, this is a big data box for fan or guild oriented websites to pull from to expose various data. …but again, this is not for casual users but rather experiences web and/or coding guy''

This API is an elasticsearch endpoint that currently contains location-based events from the past 30 days (less than that at the time of writing as we only started recording public data about a week ago). There are many ways one can pull data from elasticsearch and all of them will require some scripting knowledge. You cannot simply go to a webpage and pull down an excel spreadsheet worth of data (we leave that up to the community).

Now you may be asking yourself how does my Avatar show up in these events? If you remember back a few releases (R40?) I added a mysterious option under your nameplate’s context menu that reads ''“Show name in public stats”'':

[[Image:Show-Name.png|center]]

The purpose of this toggle is to allow your Avatar’s name to be shown in the log entries accessible from this API. By default everyone is marked as anonymous; if you want to opt-in and have your name shown you must actively select this option in game. This toggle is not retroactive – meaning that for any past events where you were marked anonymous you will remain anonymous. The bottom line is: ''your Avatar’s name is only anonymized at the time of the event''.

For those of you still around and interested in exploring the available data the API endpoint can be found at the following address: http://www.shroudoftheavatar.com:9200

I’ve also put together a small repository of example scripts to help you get started which [https://github.com/rthompsonj/SotAPublicStatsQuery can be found here].

''DISCLAIMER:'' This is an experiment in sharing. We reserve the right to change our data retention time or disable the public endpoint completely.

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