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

1.3.0 — 2026-08-31

Added

• The hover tooltip fits the screen, however many characters you have. With a large family it used to run off the top and the bottom, taking the totals and the warnings with it. The realm totals, the grand total and the warnings are now always shown; the character list takes whatever room is left on your screen, richest first, and says how many it left out. A family that already fitted looks exactly as it did.

• Family knows about profession specialisations. An armoursmith cannot make a sword and a goblin engineer cannot make a gnomish one, and Family used to tell you they could. Recipes that need a branch now say which branch, and characters on a different one are no longer offered as able to learn them. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking and Engineering on Classic Era, those plus Tailoring on Burning Crusade, and Engineering on Mists. A character you have not played since this version says it does not know rather than guessing.

Fixed

• The hover tooltip's grand total disagreed with the realms above it. If you had changed what the money counts, the tooltip still listed every character on every realm but totalled only what the bar was counting. The total is now the sum of what it just listed; the line near the bottom still says what the bar itself is counting.

• Things made by using an item now say who can make them. Refined Deeprock Salt comes out of a Salt Shaker rather than off a recipe list, so its tooltip used to say who already had some and nothing about who could make more. It now names whoever owns the shaker and has the profession to use it, and says whether theirs is ready or when it comes back.

• The transmute column on Crafting was headed ?. Any column standing for more than one recipe on a shared timer had no heading at all — it now carries the profession's name, in your language.

• Family said your characters could learn recipes they already knew. It matched a recipe to the thing it makes by name, and a recipe book does not capitalise that name the way the item itself does — so a Potion de Purification you learnt years ago was offered as one to learn. This was worst in Spanish and Russian, where it affected very nearly every recipe in the game, and rare in English and absent in German, which is why it lasted so long.

1.2.0 — 2026-08-31

Added

• The Guild column tells "no guild" apart from "not known". A character who is in no guild now has that column left blank, and the dash is kept for characters nobody has logged into since Family started recording. Both looked the same before. Each character's fills in the next time you play them.

• The Chrono column now says how many world buffs are trapped, and opens. Click the figure and a line unfolds under the character showing which ones their Chronoboon is holding — each as its own icon, with the time left written on it, and the game's own description when you hover. Click again to close it. It used to count the boons themselves, which was always one.

• Shift-click the minimap button or the broker bar to change what the money counts. It cycles between your whole family, everyone on this side of this realm, and the character you are playing. The member count beside it narrows too, and hovering says which you are looking at. A middle click does the same. Warnings about mail expiring still cover everybody, wherever they are.

• Charges are read in the guild bank too, for the tabs you have actually opened.

• Summary / Miscellaneous says who has a world buff banked. A Chronoboon Displacer holding buffs is a different item from an empty one, so Family can tell — the column shows how many each character has waiting, and says it does not know for anyone whose bags it has never read.

• Family shows how many charges are left on an oil. Wizard Oil, Mana Oil, a Bag of Marbles — anything used a fixed number of times now carries its remaining count from your bags and your bank, and Possessions draws it in the corner of the icon where the game itself puts it. The guild bank is not read yet.

• Characters on a connected realm are shared with your guild. If your guild spans connected realms — most do — Family only ever offered the characters on the realm you were standing on. The rest were in the guild, listed by the game, and invisible in Family. What you had already ticked for them is kept and takes effect now.

• /family guild test says when your announcements are not leaving. A character on a realm other than the guild's own can hear the guild and cannot speak to it — the game's doing, not Family's. It used to look like a broken channel. It now says so, and says that what you share still reaches anybody who says hello first.

• Guild records from somebody nobody has heard from in two weeks are dropped. If a guildmate turns a profession off and then stops playing, the message that says so has nobody to reach — so what they last shared would otherwise stay answerable on your client for ever. It now expires, and rebuilds itself the moment they come back. Your own sharing grid is untouched.

• /family guild says whether anything is reaching your client at all. When two people in a guild cannot see each other, the report used to end the same way whether the messages were never arriving or were arriving and being dropped — and those need looking at in opposite places. It now counts the addon messages your client hands over, every addon's and Family's own, and says which of the two is happening.

• /family guild also says what your client did with what Family sent it. The count of messages sent was a count of messages Family had written, which is not the same as messages that went: one your client refused, and one still waiting in the queue, both looked exactly like one that had gone.

• Joining a guild tells the guild you are there. The announcement was made five seconds after you joined and abandoned if your client had not yet named the guild — which just after joining is most of the time. So a character who had joined, and was standing in the guild, stayed unknown to everybody in it until their next login. It now waits until the client can answer.

• A character in a brand-new guild is recorded as being in it. If your client was slow to name the guild — which it often is just after one is created — Family gave up asking and did not try again until your next login. The character stayed recorded as being in no guild, so it was missing from everything guild share does while the panel beside it listed you from the game's own roster.

• Switching guild share on now tells your guild you are there. It used to write the setting and say nothing, so you stayed listed as not running Family on everybody's Guild panel until your next login — even with both of you switched on and both online. Switching it off still says nothing, which is the point of switching it off.

• The guild grid only offers professions that make something. Fishing, Herbalism, Skinning, First Aid and Archaeology no longer get a tick box: guild crafters answers who can make this, and a profession that makes nothing has no answer to give. Mining keeps its box, for the smelting.

• The Options panel scrolls. It had grown past the bottom of the window: the last caption was drawn over the version line and anything below that was not on the screen at all. The switches now scroll — with the mouse wheel, not only the bar — and the version line stays pinned where it was.

• Spanish and Russian now call things what the game calls them. Family's own text names a few things from the game — mooncloth, salt shakers, mageweave — and those names had been translated by hand rather than taken from the game. Spanish called mooncloth paño lunar and mageweave tela mágica; Russian called mooncloth лунная ткань. None of those is what you see on your own screen. They are now read from the client's own tables, in every language.

• A switch for Wide Family's chat reports. Options, under the Wide Family switch. A link to a family whose one character is rarely online says nobody was there, nothing was sent every time it tries, which is the answer the first time and noise by the tenth. Turn it off and the line stops; turn on Narrate what the scanners are doing and it is still there if you want it.

  It governs that report and nothing else. Somebody asking to link, a link made or ended, and anything that has gone wrong are always said.

• Guild crafters now say whose cooldown is up. Hover a transmute, a bolt of mooncloth or anything else on a daily timer and the people who can make it are listed with the state of their timer beside them — ready now, or ready in 4h — and whoever can do it now is listed first. Your own characters and your guildmates alike, on the item's tooltip and in the whole-family recipe search.

  A guildmate's line still says how long ago you heard from them, because that is how old the answer is.

  Two things Family will not claim. It says nothing about a cooldown it has never watched running, because until then there is no way to tell a transmute from a bandage. And where a cooldown lives on an item in somebody's bags rather than on a recipe, it is shown only while it is still counting down — once it comes back Family has no way of knowing whether it has been used again, so it stops saying anything.

• Click the mail figure on Activity to see what is waiting. The number said how much and never what. It now unfolds under that character, a line per letter: who it is from and what it is called on the left, what is attached to it as icons on the right — hover one to see what it is — with the gold beside them, cash on delivery in red, and how long that letter has left. Click it again to fold it away.

• Family can be locked to one panel. A new switch in Options puts a star beside every panel in the strip. Click one and Family opens there every time, now and after you log out. The star is solid on the panel it is locked to and faint everywhere else, and clicking the solid one unlocks it again.

  On the summary the lock takes the set of columns you are looking at with it, so it can mean Activity rather than the whole panel. To move it, go to another set and click the star again — it goes faint the moment the columns change, which is what says it can be moved.

  Off unless you ask for it, and walking to another panel never moves the lock: only clicking a star does.

• You can now show your guild what your characters can craft, one profession at a time. The Guild tab has a grid of your characters who are in the guild and the professions each of them has, and nothing is shared until you tick a box. A guildmate running Family then sees that profession and its skill level beside that character of yours. Untick a box and it stops being sent; what they already hold is replaced the next time they hear from you, without either of you pressing anything.

  This is the first part of it, and it carries skill levels rather than recipe lists. A skill level says somebody might know a pattern. It never says they do.

  Guild share itself is still off until you switch it on in Options, and the grid is greyed and says so until you do.

  The grid starts folded, because the Guild tab is about the guild's people and a player with eight characters in it has thirty rows of grid above the roster. Its heading says how much you are offering while it is folded, and one click opens it.

• The panel counts people rather than characters. "9 running Family" in a guild where eight of those nine were your own alts is not an answer to the question that number is there to ask. Your characters count as one — you.

Fixed

• Opened mail no longer follows you to another panel. Clicking the mail count on Activity unfolded the letters, and they stayed on screen after switching to Currencies or any other panel, under members that had nothing to do with them.

• And the game itself says it far less. Reaching somebody who is not there produced one red "No player named …" from the game for every message that had already been sent — four per character, twenty for a family of five, and none of them Family's to take back. Family now sends one message to somebody it has not just heard from and waits a moment before sending anything else, so a character who is not there costs one line instead of four.

• Trying to reach a linked family who is offline is quiet now. It used to walk that family's characters four times over — twenty attempts for a family of five, four copies of every line Family printed, and twenty refusals from the game. It answers the first refusal and ignores the rest, which is the same news arriving again; and the lines naming each character as it tries them have gone from the chat frame, because the working is not the answer. What is left is the one sentence saying nobody was there. Switch on Narrate what the scanners are doing in Options to see the working.

• "Which guildie can craft this?" now has an answer. A profession you share with the guild carries what it can make, and a guildmate running Family sees it in two places: on the item's own tooltip, under the crafters from your own family, and in the recipe search on the Professions panel, as a second group beside your own. One box, one question, two sources.

  The answer names the character that can make it. Everything shared this way is a character in your guild, so it is on the roster you already have: whisper it if it is online, and see that it is not if it is not.

  Nothing but identifiers crosses, so a recipe list read on a French client is found by somebody typing German, and neither of you has ever held a word the other could read. A recipe your client gives no identifier for is not shared, and the panel says how many were left out rather than implying the list is complete.

  It is carried once. Each shared profession sends how many recipes it has and a fingerprint of them, and the list itself is asked for only when that differs from what the other end already holds — so a settled guild costs nothing after the day everybody met. Untick a profession and the list goes with it, on their side as well as yours, without either of you pressing anything.

• A pattern now says which of your guildmates already knows it. A guildmate's shared list is the list of recipes they know, so a formula one of them is holding is one you may not need to buy — you can ask instead. It sits on the same block that says which of your own characters know it or could learn it.

• Hovering something craftable now says who can make another one — yours as well as your guild's, in one block. A pattern still gets the other answer instead: who knows that recipe and who could learn it. They are two questions about two different items — the plans, and the thing the plans make — and neither is now answered on the other's tooltip. It only ever said who owned one. The block that names crafters answers about a pattern — who knows it, who could learn it — and finds people by the subtype and skill written on a pattern's tooltip, which the thing it makes does not carry. So the robe told you who had one and nothing about who could make another; and once guild crafters arrived it named a guildmate who could while staying silent about the character in your own list.

• Enchanting answers on tooltips too. An enchanting recipe carries the spell it is and, on Classic Era, nothing else — the game gives no id for the thing it makes, even for the ones that make something. So no id on the oil under your cursor, or on the formula that teaches it, could ever match, and enchanting was the one profession that answered nothing. Family now also recognises them by what your own client calls them, which is how the crafters from your own family have always been found.

• A recipe only somebody in the guild knows now has its picture, instead of a question mark. A picture is not an identifier and does not cross, so there was nothing to draw until Family started asking its own client for one.

• The list of who can make a recipe no longer runs off the right of the panel, and nobody is hidden by it. It shows the four highest-skilled and counts the rest, and clicking the row unfolds every one of them — your characters with their skill, and your guildmates with how old the record is. Clicking again folds it away.

  The four it shows are the four you would actually ask: sorted by skill rather than by name, so what the count hides is the people you would ask last.

• Shared recipes now work on Classic Era. A recipe was carried as the spell it is, and on Era the game does not give a spell for trade skill recipes at all — it gives the item each one makes. So a guild on Era shared nothing but enchanting, which is the one thing there with a spell and no item. A recipe now travels with whichever identifier your client gives it, and with both where it gives both.

• A profession with nothing to share no longer advertises an empty list. One whose window came back with no recipes still announced a count and a fingerprint of nothing, which the other end asked about and received nothing for — showing up as 4 lists, 0 recipes in all.

• /family guild test says how many of the recipes you hold carry the id of what they make. A recipe with only its spell can answer on the pattern and never on the food, so a guild whose lists are all spell and no item looks exactly like a guild whose lists never arrived.

• A guildmate who was offline when you shared something now gets it as soon as they log in. Two clients that had spoken to each other in the last six hours exchanged nothing further, which is what keeps a settled guild quiet — but it also meant that anything you shared while somebody was logged off waited out those six hours. Each announcement now carries a single number saying what you are offering, so a client that has less than that asks for it at once and one that already has it stays quiet.

• The recipe search says whether it looked at your guild, and says that it could when guild share is off. It is labelled whole family, and nothing about it revealed that it had grown.

• The guild list's right-hand column no longer cuts off how old a record is — 8 characters || 1h... was losing the one thing that says how much to trust the other two.

• Opening a shared profession's window now tells the guild there is something new to send. Ticking a profession you had never opened shared a skill level and nothing else, and opening it afterwards changed nothing anybody could see: no box had moved, so nothing was announced, and both ends went on holding recent gear and talents in silence. The recipe list never crossed.

• Update now means it. It used to send an ordinary announcement, which the other end is entitled to answer with "nothing has changed" — so the one button you press because you think what you are looking at is stale could do nothing at all, and look no different from one that is broken.

• Professions recorded before Family kept track of them by identity can now be shared. A character last played a while ago had its professions filed under their names, and the grid would not offer any of them — it said the character had no professions at all, while the line beneath it listed them by name. They are offered now, and that line is left only for the ones the client really gave no identifier for.

• A character could end up with no guild recorded at all, and then behave as though they had never been in one: missing from the grid of what you share, and shown as not running Family on your own guild roster, while looking perfectly ordinary everywhere else in Family. The game does not answer which guild you are in for the first few seconds of a session, and Family took no answer for an answer. It now waits for the client and asks again. Log in once on any character this happened to and it fills itself in.

• A character who leaves a guild is no longer recorded as still being in it.

• /family guild test now lists any of your characters with no guild recorded, so the cause is something you can read rather than something you have to guess at.

• A profession whose window opened and showed nothing no longer reads as never opened. Those are two different things and the panel now says which it saw — and, when a profession that makes things lists nothing, names the likeliest reason: another addon filtering or replacing that window. That distinction is the difference between a diagnosis and an evening.

• A profession window with its categories folded up is now read in full. The window lists only the rows it is showing, so a collapsed heading hid every recipe under it and the scan came away with nothing — the same trap Family has avoided in the skill list since it was written, in the one window the recipes are actually in. It is unfolded, read, and folded back exactly as it was found.

• A link request to a second character of a family you are already linked with no longer waits for ever. Ask two characters of the same family, link through the first, and the request to the second used to sit on the Wide Family panel saying waiting for them to answer — about a link you already had. Their copy of Family recognised the situation and said nothing back; it now answers, and the request clears itself. Hearing from that family at all clears it too, so an older copy on the other end costs you nothing.

• Leaving a guild now clears what that guild had shared with you, and what you had offered it. It used to stay out of sight on disk and come back out of date if you ever rejoined.

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.