About Thottbot Forever
From August 2004 until November 2010, Thottbot was where World of Warcraft players went to look things up. It began life in 2001 as a news aggregator for online role-playing games, was rewritten into a searchable WoW database three months before the game launched, and grew into the site everyone had open in a second window: item stats, quest walkthroughs, drop rates, NPC locations and a comment thread under every single page where players told each other where Mankrik’s wife was.
Its data came from players. A Lua plugin, bundled with the Cosmos UI suite, recorded what you saw in game and let you upload it. Coverage depended on who was playing and who bothered to upload, which is exactly what made it feel like a community project rather than a product. ZAM Network bought Wowhead in 2007, ran the two side by side for three years, and folded Thottbot into Wowhead on November 30, 2010.
Why this site was made
World of Warcraft: Forever was announced at BlizzCon on September 12, 2026 as a third World of Warcraft alongside Modern and Classic. It builds on vanilla-era Azeroth with three new zones, over a thousand new quests, nine new dungeons, two new raids and a new playable Skyborne race, and reporting from the announcement has the level cap staying at 60. A new game deserves a new database, built the way the old one was: fast, plain, dense with facts and driven by the people playing it.
Thottbot Forever keeps the parts that mattered: a page for every item, spell, quest, NPC, zone
and object; comments under each of them, rated by the community; data uploaded by players; and
URLs like /?i=19019 that still work. It drops the parts that did not: it is fast on a phone,
it has a proper JSON API, and it runs on modern infrastructure.
Where the data comes from
The site opens with what the game client itself knows, read from Forever’s own data files: every item and spell the client has, the zones and their maps, the dungeons and raids, the flight points, the factions, the professions, the classes, the races and the item sets. When the game is patched, the new build is loaded over it.
What the client cannot say comes from the people playing: creatures, quests, what drops where, who sells and teaches what, and where everything stands. That part of the database starts empty and fills in as players upload what they see, which is how Thottbot worked in the first place. Some items are kept encrypted in the client, and have no name here until somebody sees one in game. See Contribute for how uploads work.
Platforms
Reading the site
- Any current browser, on a desktop or a phone. Every page is rendered on the server and works with JavaScript turned off; JavaScript only makes the forms smoother.
- Dark by default, light when your system asks for it, and built to be read with a keyboard alone or a screen reader.
- Beyond the pages: a JSON API, Atom feeds of the latest comments, the latest additions and what is different in Forever, and search from your browser’s address bar.
In the game
- The Thottbot Forever addon, for the World of Warcraft: Forever client, records what you see as you play. You upload the file it saves with the Thottbot Forever Uploader; Contribute says how.
- Signing in, to comment or upload, is with your Battle.net account. The site never sees your password.
Where it runs
- On Cloudflare Workers, close to wherever you are reading from, with Cloudflare’s own storage beside it: D1, an SQLite database, for the data; KV for caching; R2 for icons, maps, screenshots and uploads.
- The same code builds for plain Node.js with a local SQLite file, so the site is not tied to one host.
Made with
Open-source software, each piece under its own license. The main parts are below; the full list is under Licenses.
| What | For | License |
|---|---|---|
| Svelte | The components every page is made of | MIT |
| SvelteKit | Rendering pages on the server, routing and forms | MIT |
| TypeScript | The language the site is written in | Apache-2.0 |
| Tailwind CSS | Styling | MIT |
| Zod | Checking what the site is sent | MIT |
| uqr | Drawing QR codes | MIT |
| Vite | Building the site | MIT |
| Vitest | Unit tests | MIT |
| Playwright | Testing the pages in a real browser | Apache-2.0 |
| axe-core | Checking every page’s accessibility | MPL-2.0 |
| ESLint and Prettier | Keeping the code tidy | MIT |
| Wrangler | Running and publishing the site on Cloudflare | MIT OR Apache-2.0 |
| Fengari | Running the in-game addon’s Lua in its tests | MIT |
Reading the game’s files
The site’s first data is read out of the game client with tools built on these, run by hand when a new build of the game comes out. None of them runs on the site.
| What | For | License |
|---|---|---|
| wow.export | Reading the game client’s tables, icons and maps | MIT |
| WoWDBDefs | The layouts of the client’s tables | CC BY-SA 4.0 (definitions), BSD-3-Clause (code) |
| wow-listfile | The names of the client’s files | Not stated; credited with thanks |
| sharp | Converting icons and map tiles for the web | Apache-2.0, with libvips under LGPL-3.0-or-later |
Licenses
The addon
The in-game addon, Thottbot Forever, is under the MIT License.
Fonts
- Open Sans, which sets the text you are reading, is copyright 2020 The Open Sans Project Authors and licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
- Friz Quadrata, which sets the headings and the navigation, was designed by Ernst Friz and Victor Caruso in 1966.
Game content
The names, text, icons and maps of World of Warcraft: Forever are copyright Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., and are shown here as a reference for players. Comments and screenshots belong to the people who posted them.
Every package
Every package installed to build and test the site, and to read the game’s files, with the license it declares. The lists are made from the project’s lockfiles each time the site is built.
The site: 342 packages
MIT (248) · Apache-2.0 (39) · MPL-2.0 (15) · LGPL-3.0-or-later (10) · ISC (9) · BSD-2-Clause (6) · MIT OR Apache-2.0 (4) · Apache-2.0 AND LGPL-3.0-or-later (3) · BSD-3-Clause (3) · 0BSD (1) · Apache-2.0 AND LGPL-3.0-or-later AND MIT (1) · BlueOak-1.0.0 (1) · CC0-1.0 (1) · MIT-0 (1)
The game-data tools: 34 packages
Apache-2.0 (14) · LGPL-3.0-or-later (10) · MIT (4) · Apache-2.0 AND LGPL-3.0-or-later (3) · 0BSD (1) · Apache-2.0 AND LGPL-3.0-or-later AND MIT (1) · ISC (1)
Contact
To reach the administrators about something broken on the site, abuse, your account, a security problem or a legal matter, write to them here, signed in, and they answer on the site; or, without an account, email contact@thottbot-forever.com. A comment that breaks the rules has a Report button of its own, which goes to the moderators; missing or wrong game data belongs in the page’s comments or an upload.
Legal
World of Warcraft, Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Thottbot Forever is a fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. Comments are the property of their authors.