Family — changes

What changed in each release, in the words a player needs rather than the words a commit message uses. tools/release.sh cuts the top section into the release notes CurseForge shows.

A player knows nothing about how Family is built and should not have to. No mechanism, no internal names, no reasoning about how something came to be wrong, no lessons learned: an entry says what the addon now does, and what it used to do only where that is what the reader noticed. Everything else belongs in the commit, in DECISIONS.md or in LESSONS.md, all three of which exist so that none of it has to be here.

Newest first. Anything under Unreleased is written as it lands, so that cutting a release is a decision rather than an afternoon of archaeology.

Unreleased

1.1.0 — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Where a hearthstone is bound now reads in your own words. A character last played on a Classic Era client showed "Ironforge" to a French player whose own client calls it "Forgefer" — the two expansions disagree even in the same language. Family now records which place it is rather than what that client called it, and each member is named by the client you are reading on. A member keeps its old spelling until you next log into them.

• The lists you pick from are no longer see-through. The panel underneath showed through them, so a character's name and a recipe's name were drawn on top of each other and neither could be read. This was the member list, and the realm and class lists on the character panel.

• Members shared by a linked family are now listed under the realm they are on, not in one undivided run of names. A family with thirty characters across three realms was impossible to read, and two characters with the same name on different realms could not be told apart.

• Each heading in that list has room above it, so a section begins instead of continuing.

• The Wide Family panel lists members under their realm and faction, on both sides — the characters you are sharing and the ones a linked family shares with you. A family of thirty arrived as one undivided column of names with nothing saying which realm a row was on, and two characters with the same name could not be told apart at all.

• The list of what a linked family shares with you is now in a stable order. It had none, so it could rearrange itself between refreshes.

• Panels no longer draw themselves squashed the first time they are opened. On the Guild panel a guildmate's name, rank and item level were written over one another in the same place, and closing the window and opening it again appeared to fix it. The same fault was waiting on every other panel that draws a list. All of them are drawn at their proper width the first time now.

• The summary no longer complains in the chat frame every time it is drawn. Its row of column-set buttons was four pixels wider than the room it had, in English, and said so on every draw. The buttons now sit a pixel closer together.

1.0.0 — 2026-08-29

Family records what each of your characters owns and knows, and shows it to you while you are logged in on a different one. It starts empty and fills as you play: a character appears the first time you log in on them, and a family of ten takes ten logins to be complete.

Everything it holds, it holds because it watched it happen. There is no import from another addon, nothing is fetched from a server, and every screen says how old what it is showing is — because a number with no date on it is a guess wearing a fact's clothes.

What it shows you

• A summary of the whole family, a row each, with the columns you choose: level and item level, money, rested experience, time played, bags and bank space, mail and what is about to expire, auctions and what is riding on them, professions and their ranks, currencies, crafting cooldowns, guild, hearthstone, race and class.
• Possessions — one character's bags, bank, mailbox, auctions and guild bank, drawn as the containers themselves rather than as a list, because where a thing sits is information.
• Professions, with every recipe each character knows, sorted by difficulty, by the item level of what it makes, or by the skill it needs. Search the whole family for a recipe and it tells you who can make it.
• Abilities and talents — both specialisations, drawn as the tree they actually are, with glyphs and the spellbook.
• Character — gear with item levels, reputations, played time, experience.
• On every item tooltip in the game: who in the family has one and where it is, and on a recipe, who can make it, who could learn it today, and who is not high enough yet.

Sharing, if you want it

Both of these ship switched off, and both have a panel you can read before deciding.

• Guild share shows your guild the gear and talents of your characters in it, and shows you theirs. Nothing else — and nothing that Inspect does not already give away.
• Wide Family links two families that are not one account. Each of you says what the other may see, one character and one category at a time, on a grid that starts with nothing ticked. Nothing is exchanged until both of you agree, and either of you can end it.

In your language

English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, following whatever your client is set to. Where the game already has a word for something — a gear slot, a class, a profession, a race, a talent — Family uses the game's own word, so it says what the rest of your interface says. A character recorded on somebody else's client, in a language you do not read, still reads in yours.

Fixed since the last beta

• The bank is drawn as a bank on Possessions, rather than as another bag.

• A bank record can no longer be replaced by an empty one. Family could scan a bank that was not in front of it — the game answers about the bank whether or not you are standing at one — and the result was a tidy record of an empty bank written over a real one. If a character's bank has gone blank, open a bank on them once and it comes back; nothing was ever lost from the game itself.

• The free space in a bank is counted rather than asked for. The game reports four more free slots than a bank has, so a full bank could read 4 free and an empty one could total more free slots than it has room for. Visit a bank once on each character and the figure corrects itself.

Upgrading from a beta

Open each profession window once per character. Nothing else needs doing, and nothing is lost if you do not.

1.0.0-beta.3 — 2026-08-28

Added

• Family speaks German, French, Spanish and Russian. Every screen, every slash command, every message it prints, and the manual on the About tab. Where the game already has a word for something — a gear slot, a class, a reputation standing, a profession, a race — Family uses the game's own word, so it says what the rest of your interface says.
• Mail on its way has a column of its own in the Activity set, beside the mailbox count, and it no longer waits for a mailbox to have been looked at before it will tell you.
• Nothing is cut off in a longer language. Columns and buttons are measured against the words actually in them and widened where they need it.

Fixed

• Professions, races and recipes are shown in your language, whoever recorded them. A character last played on a French client used to stay French on a Spanish one, and a member shared with you was named in whatever their owner was running. Races and recipes need nothing from you. Professions want one rescan — open each profession window once per character, which also puts their recipe lists right.
• A recipe list no longer arrives half translated. The rest of it fills in as your client loads the items, rather than staying in the language it was written down in.
• The undead are undead. Where Family had no word for a race it showed an internal one — Scourge, NightElf — that the game shows nobody.
• A guildmate who is running Family is no longer listed as not running it. Family knows somebody runs it by hearing from them, and a client that already had your characters used to answer your announcement with silence. It says hello back now. This showed up most for anyone who had cleared their saved data or reinstalled, whose guild then looked empty.
• The professions panel names the profession above the recipe list, rather than a number.
• A recipe you click with no profession window open stays marked until you open one, and the message names the button that opens it. It used to tell you which button to press and then lose the recipe you had picked.
• A profession with no recipes is no longer reported as recorded in another language. Fishing, herbalism, mining and skinning have no window to open.
• The line saying which professions are missing from the list now wraps instead of running off the right edge.
• The minimap total agrees with the tooltip under it. The figure on the bar was worked out once at login, so it drifted by however much you had spent since.
• Dates take less room. 19 days ago is now 19d ago, matching the in 19d the columns beside it already used.

Changed

• The minimap tooltip groups characters by realm and then by side. An Alliance character and a Horde one on the same realm share no bank, no mailbox and no auction house, and a single list of them read as one pool of characters that could pass things between them. Each side now carries its own count and its own money, the way the summary has always shown it.
• Anything Family counts is phrased for the language it is in, rather than by adding an "s" to a word.
• Wide Family is described as what it is: off by default. It shipped with a warning that none of its checks had run against a real server; that pass has since run on all three clients. It is still off until you ask for it — sharing is the one thing a later version cannot take back — but that is a choice about consent now rather than a caveat about testing.

1.0.0-beta.2 — 2026-08-27

Fixed

• The Wide Family grid's column headings no longer overlap. "Sibling Member", above a linked family's shared characters, was drawn through the first category column beside it.

• A sibling's Last seen says when they were last shared. It was a dash: when somebody else's character last played is not something that crosses the wire, so the column had nothing of its own to say. It now answers the question it can — how old what you hold about them is — written as shared 2 h ago, so a date with no word beside it is still your own family's sighting and one that says shared came from theirs.

• A realm with characters on both sides reads as two groups again. The second side's heading sat one line under the first side's subtotal, and the realm's own total sat one line under the last side's — so a screen of numbers ran together with no telling which figures belonged to whom. Both now have a line's space above them, on every column set.

• Possessions no longer looks broken when you switch to the whole family. That mode has nothing to draw until you type something, but the caption over the box still read "dim everything but" — over a panel with nothing left on it to dim. It now says what the box is for, and the cursor goes into it. Professions says the same thing in the same way.

• Everyone's gear is split by side, the way the summary is. A row on that screen is a class picture and nineteen slots, and the only place it said which side its character was on was the tooltip of the picture — so a family with one Horde character in it looked like a family that had lost them. Alliance and Horde now get a heading each, with a count, whenever there are both to tell apart.

1.0.0-beta.1 — 2026-08-26

Added

• The whole family on one screen. Every character you have played, grouped by realm and by side, with money, bags, professions, currencies and the rest — and totals per realm.
• Possessions, drawn as the bags themselves rather than as a list. Clicking an item opens the bag it is in, when it is the character you are playing.
• Professions, with three sort orders, and clicking a recipe finds it in the open window.
• Abilities and talents, both specialisations, glyphs and the spellbook.
• Character: equipped gear laid out as the character sheet lays it out, with the enchants and gems on it, plus currencies, reputations, the quest log and achievements.
• Family on the game's own item tooltips: who has one and where it is, and on a recipe, who can make it, who can learn it today and who is not high enough yet.
• Everyone's gear on one screen. Character, Equipped gear, Whole family: one row per member — their class, then every slot in the order the character sheet puts them, with the item level over each icon and the item's own tooltip on hover. Filters on realm and class, each a list of what your family actually has. A character sheet answers what is this character wearing; this answers who is behind.
• Mail is written down as you post it. Send anything to one of your own characters and it appears against them straight away — the money, the attachments and all — marked as being in the post until that character opens their own mailbox, at which point what is really there replaces it.
• Guild share. On, and one switch turns it off. Everyone in your guild running Family shows their characters' gear and talents to everyone else running it, and you see theirs — including the ones who are offline, once you have seen them once. Talents come across as the shape of the build — which trees, how many points in each — rather than talent by talent, because whole trees for everybody's alts would take a channel Family shares with every other addon in the guild. Nothing else is shared: bags, mail, money and the rest need a Wide Family link. It is on by default because all of it is what the game already shows anyone who inspects you; a consent dialogue in front of that would teach people to click through consent dialogues.
• Pictures on the tabs, on the Character panel's sections, and on the summary's two side filters — which were the letters "A" and "H", initials that mean nothing in four of the five languages Family supports. Every one of them was looked at on all three clients before it went in, because a texture path that does not exist draws nothing and says nothing. The window and the tab strip are a little wider than they were, so that no label and no panel lost any room to the pictures in front of them.
• Every section of the Character panel carries a picture too, and the summary's two side filters are the game's own faction banners.
• Realms split by side, where there is a split to make. A realm with characters on both gets a section and a subtotal for each, because two characters on opposite sides of one realm share nothing this table is about — different auction house, different mail, different everything. A realm with one side on it is left alone.
• Professions carry their own picture on the buttons at the top of the Professions panel, wherever the client hands one over with the rank. Where it does not — the older skill list has no equivalent — the button reads as it always did rather than showing an invented one.
• Each filter box now has its caption in front of it rather than after it, and on the whole-family gear grid it sits beside the two filters instead of underneath them.
• The realm and class filters are lists, not buttons that step through the values one click at a time. Stepping was tolerable at three realms and unusable at eleven classes, and a long realm name wrote itself straight through the side of the button it was on.
• One control for looking at everybody, everywhere it is offered. Possessions and Professions had a tick box and a caption for it and Character had a button; they all have the button now. Switching between two ways of looking is not a setting, and it should not be dressed as one on two panels and not on the third.
• Search across the whole family, on Possessions and on Professions, saying who has what.
• Crafting and item cooldowns, recorded as the moment they come ready, so they stay right however long the client has been shut, and announced when you log in.
• A minimap button and a data broker feed, with the family's money on it.
• Wide Family, switched off in this version: two players link their families and each says what the other may see, one member and one category at a time, on a grid that starts with nothing ticked. Nothing is exchanged before the other side accepts, unticking a box asks them to forget it at once, and borrowed members are kept apart from your own. Exchanges happen when a linked family comes online, when you change what is shared, and on demand. It is complete and its checks pass, but none of those checks has run against a real server, and sharing is the one thing a later version cannot undo — so it waits until it has been proven live. /family wide on to help test it.
• Siblings, part of Wide Family and switched off with it. Among the members a linked family has shared with you, tick the ones worth seeing every day: they then appear in your summary, under their own family's name, on the realm they are on. It sends nothing and asks nobody — they decided you may see them before the name could appear in the list.
• Automatic exchange can be switched off, on the Wide Family panel. Off means nothing happens without a person asking for it; Update now stays, and always will. Withdrawing what somebody may see is still sent at once, because that one is a promise rather than a convenience.

Fixed

• Family had never received a single addon message. Not one, on any client, in either direction, for the whole of the project's life. The handler for the game's addon-message event took the event's first value where the game passes the event's name, so the test that checks the message is Family's compared "CHAT_MSG_ADDON" against "Family" and dropped everything on the first line. Wide Family link requests that were never answered and a guild panel reading "0 running Family" were both this, and neither was a fault in those features. Five hundred checks missed it because every one of them handed the message straight to the receiver, covering the transport in detail and the one line joining it to the game not at all.

• A linked family is one entry. Its line opens to show both halves in one place: what they may see of your characters, and what they share of theirs with a Sibling tick against each. The separate Shared with you list at the foot of the panel is gone — a link is one family, and drawing it as two things is what left both halves fighting for the width of a row.

• The Wide Family panel says what "automatically" means. Under the switch is a line saying that coming online is the only time an exchange happens by itself, that what you each see of the other is as it was at the last one, and that Update now on a family's line brings it up to date. Nothing about it changed — it was already a snapshot by design (§6) — but the panel was letting the word "automatically" promise a freshness it never has.

• Update reaches a family through whichever of their characters is online. It used to whisper the one you heard from last and give up on being told they were not there — which is usually the wrong one, since a person plays one character at a time and the link may have been made a week ago. Family now tries the next of theirs, and the next, and only says the family is offline once every one of them has been eliminated. Pressing Update again then sends nothing rather than starting over.

• Pressing Update on somebody who is offline really no longer floods your chat. The first attempt matched the name the client complained about against the name Family whispers, and those are not the same string — Grella against Grella-Thunderstrike — so it dropped nothing and the flood carried on unchanged.

• Pressing Update on somebody who is offline no longer floods your chat. An exchange is hundreds of whispers and the client answers every one of them with No player named X is currently playing. Family now notices the first one, drops everything else queued for them, and says so once. Pressing it again says they are offline instead of doing it all over.

• The Wide Family panel says what they share with you. Shared with you now carries the same nine columns as the consent grid, greyed — so both halves of a link can be read against each other. The marks are what the other side said it granted rather than what happened to arrive, because an empty mailbox and a mailbox nobody shared send the same nothing.

• The panel says that a linked family's line opens its grid, which nothing did — the line looks like a heading rather than a button.

• Column headings no longer touch, and a family's name no longer runs under its own summary.

• A sibling's things show on item tooltips. "Who has one of these" is the question a shared family is most often asked, and the answer left siblings out — the item index was built from your own members alone. Their line says whose character it is, because a count on a tooltip reads as I can go and get that, which is not true of somebody else's bank.

• A linked family's characters are not drawn in with your own on Character / Equipped gear / Whole family. They were, briefly, and with no heading over them — which on that screen is nineteen item pictures in a row with nothing else to say whose they are.

• Lists close when you click away from them. The member button's list, and the realm and class lists, could only be closed by choosing something from them — which turns a list you opened to look at into a question you have to answer. Clicking anywhere else puts them away now, and so does Escape.

• You can look at what a family shares without adopting them. Abilities & Talents, Possessions, Professions and Character now offer everyone a linked family shares with you, listed under that family's name rather than filed under a realm. Making somebody a sibling goes back to meaning the one thing it was meant to mean — who belongs in your summary, beside your own — instead of also being the only way to see any of their records at all.

• Money can be shared. It always could — the switch was drawn off the end of the consent grid, where nobody could reach it. The grid asked for 816 pixels of a row that is about 712, so its last column fell off the edge and the one before it was cut in half. It shares out the room it has now, and says so if it ever cannot.

• A category nobody shared reads as unknown, not as nought. A linked family's members were listed on the summary as having no money, never having played, and being at maximum level — three facts, none of them told to us, all of them deduced from an absence. Nothing shared is now drawn as nothing known (§2.2).

• Tick a whole column at once. Clicking a category's name in the consent grid grants it for every member, and clicking again clears it — one decision instead of one per member, and one message to the other family instead of one per member.

• The summary lines its siblings up. A linked family's name now sits under the realm's, and their members under yours, rather than each a step further right; and the block is held apart from your own members, and the grand totals from the last realm's, by a blank line.

• The note about sharing sits with the sharing. It was at the foot of the panel, below the list of what other families share with you, where it read as a note about that.

• The Wide Family panel stops drawing over itself. The consent grid's column headings stayed on screen after the grid was closed and lay across the sentence below it, a borrowed member was cut short to "Grella of Grella-Thunder..." because the row had last been used by the grid and kept its narrow name column, and each link's summary ran underneath its own Update now and Unlink buttons. Rows are reused as the list changes shape, and they now come back to the panel in the state they were built in rather than wearing whatever the last section left on them.

• Accept, Decline, Ask again, Forget and Unlink can be clicked. Every button on the Wide Family panel drew perfectly and did nothing. They sit on top of a row that spans the whole width of the list, and nothing said which of the two was in front — so the game broke the tie by which was built first, and the first time the panel needed a row it had not built before, that row went in front of the buttons and started taking their clicks. The buttons and tick boxes are now put in front outright, and rows with nothing to click no longer take the mouse at all, which also stops headings from lighting up under the cursor as though they led somewhere.

• "Of the Eagle" items are described as they really are. A random-enchantment item is one item id wearing one of dozens of suffixes, and the suffix is where its whole stat line lives — so bags, bank, guild bank and mail tooltips were showing the generic item and "<Random enchantment>" where the stats should be. Family now keeps the extra detail for the items that have any, and only for those: a bag of cloth costs exactly what it always did. Records already on disk pick it up the next time that bag or bank is seen.

• Your own characters count as running Family in the guild list. Your announcement comes back to you off the guild channel and is correctly ignored as an echo, which had the effect of your own row reading not running Family — on the one client in the guild you can be certain about.

• Guild share works across connected realms. Messages were matched on the guild's name and the sender's realm, and two people in one guild on connected realms do not agree about what realm they are on — so every message was dropped and the panel read "0 running Family" in a guild where several people had it. Matched on the guild's name now.

• Family gets out of the way when it sends you somewhere. Clicking a quest, or a worn item on your own paper doll, opens the game's own window — which drew behind Family and could not be brought in front of it by clicking, because a higher layer always wins. Family closes instead; /family brings it back on the tab you left it on. Clicking a recipe is not one of these: it selects the recipe in a profession window you already had open, so Family stays where it is and you can click the next one.

• Summary / Crafting: every crafting cooldown the family has, one column per kind, green when it is available and grey with the time when it is not. Thirty alchemy transmutes share one timer and appear as one column called Alchemy — Family works that out by watching them come back together rather than from a list somebody has to keep. A salt shaker is in there under leatherworking, because Family knows which recipe makes it. A column appears once Family has seen that cooldown running at least once: the client will not say a recipe has a cooldown while it is ready, so that has to be learned.

• Your hearthstone is no longer announced as ready. Two faults met in one message. The floor for "a cooldown worth knowing about" was one minute, which let in hearthstones, trinkets and mana stones — it is six hours now, comfortably below anything on a daily and comfortably above everything that is just a cooldown. And an item's cooldown was reported as ready for ever once its moment passed: using an item needs no window open, so Family sees nothing and cannot know it has not been used ten times since. Those are dropped when they elapse; while they are still counting down they are kept, because that much is known. A crafting cooldown is different and still counts — using one needs the profession window, which Family scans.

• "Crafting ready" for a profession you gave up. Family keeps the recipe list of a profession you drop, which is right — take it up again and nothing is lost. It was also keeping that profession's cooldowns, and those never expire on their own: the entry is only rewritten when that profession's window is opened, and it never will be again. Cooldowns now come only from professions the character still has.

• /family ready names what is ready instead of counting it. "3 ready" answers a question nobody asked; which three is how you find one that should not be in the list.

• Sorting recipes by difficulty orders within each colour too. A colour is a band of four and nine grey recipes are not equally trivial — ordered by name inside the band, Heavy Linen Bandage sat above Runecloth Bandage, which is alphabetical order wearing a difficulty label. Inside a band it now goes by the skill each one needed, then by the item level of what it makes, then by name.

• Rows that do something light up on hover, and rows that do not, do not. A quest belonging to a character you are not playing cannot be opened, so it no longer offers to.

• A list opened from inside the Family window is closed with it. Both the member picker and the new filter lists float above the game rather than inside the panel, so hiding the panel never took them with it.

Notes

• Family starts empty and fills up as you play. It imports nothing from anywhere.
• Bank, mailbox and each profession window need opening once per character — the game only shows their contents while they are open.
• Nothing is ever reported as empty when it was simply never seen, and every screen says how old what it is showing is.