Wow Interface

One of the beautiful things about World of Warcraft is the support that Blizzard has given for extensions and "wow addons" to the basic client of the game. These WoW interface additions are a great way to improve your enjoyment of the game, whether it's through automation of the routine things the game does, like tracking resources on gathering and hunting missions, or additions that improve the social experience, like ways to track gold-spammers and report them to the Blizzard support staff.

WoW interface additions are typically installed in the Interface/Addons subdirectory of the client, and depending on the WoW interface itself, will either be always on (for passive wow addons) that do things like track resources and scale map sizing information, or be invoked by a "slash" command for those that get toggled from the text channel prompt, like /civil.

Some WoW interface patches include keyloggers, and the ability to macro certain commands. Be careful with those, and read the patch notes carefully. Blizzard has objections in their terms of service for overly automated characters and for using 'bots to gather resources and mine; if they catch you doing this, it can get your account suspended. Other WoW interface patches are a bit more benign, and just restore sound files or animations from prior versions of WoW, like the old "killing stroke" sound effect.

A good place to find WoW interfaces is, not surprisingly, www.wowinterfaces.com, which has a message board where the people who develop a particular WoW interface take feedback on how it works, ask about what features would be good to have, and offer technical support if glitches pop up.

No matter how casual or severe a World of Warcraft player you may be, customizing how you interface with the game can offer some serious quality of life improvements.