WowAce

Hi there,

Postal is such a great AddOn. Thank you for this!

The only thing disturbing is the current way the profile management is implemented.

There should be a default profile, which all characters use on one realm. This way it's designed just more user-friendly. Seperate / character-specific profiles can still be created and mantained.

Best Regards,

Daniel

Others like to see it solved this way as well.

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/postal?comment=2610

Requested this feature 1-2 years ago. Got a nasty reply by addon author. I wouldnt hold my breath.

The decision to force user to select profile one alt at a time is just so... meh nevermind.

Author please reconsider. Again.

Dandoman, I agree that a shared default profile for users with the option to use character specific profiles would be best.  Unfortunately, this design is fundamental to the addon and was designed back in 2008.  Changing it now is neither simple nor without issue.  The main problem with making this type of change now is the user experience.  There have to be many users by now who have unique profiles per character so making a global change to using a default profile would break their settings per character and required them to manually set each unique profile again.  I am not going to force this on the users.  I will hold onto this issue for now and give it more thought on possible solutions.

addonaddictblabla, I have been the only author on this addon since 10/2020.  I don't recall ever giving a nasty response to anyone.  But yes, I do turn down features requests the same as you will find with other owners/developers of software.

Hi Zim,

I was referring to author way before 2020. I like your reply VS nasty "nope go away" BS that the previous one was giving out.

Regarding messing up peoples profiles - im not sure that would be an issue as most people who actually cared enough to setup different settings per toon, did so with manual "main" profile. I think the QoL that this brings far outweights niche cases like this. Every single user of postal (friend /* guildies) i know all hate the profiling on their alt armies.

I hope there can be some easy solution for this, as it is truly the only addon on my massive list of addons that is so extremely alt un-friendly.

Unfortunately there are no better alternatives, and addon is great for 99% of other features.

Thank you for maintaining it btw!

Hi addonaddictblabla, thanks for clarifying on who your comments were directed at.  And I do agree that a default profile would be best.

addonaddictblabla made this suggestion in the main comments section which I want to copy here for consideration.  "add a toggle to "set X profile to ALL characters?  For example, I log with 30 characters - then go to postal settings and make a new profile - then in options set that new profile for ALL 30 characters at once via this new button."

Regarding your comment " I want to give it some thought. But if you have more ideas of methods to do this without breaking current users like the one you just provided, please let me know.":

I dont have any idea how to code so disregard whatever doesnt make sense:

1) Code it in a way that any NEW character (1st login on that character) gets set to default profile. Any existing characters that were already given a profile (either current by-character profile or a custom-made profile) will keep said profile.

2) Making a button to set X profile GLOBAL will overwrite all custom/default profiles, and set each known character as X profile. Not sure how that would affect current users? I believe it would be like a new feature, they can opt in or ignore it. New characters will still keep by-character profiling, although I would highly prefer option #1 instead. This option is more of a hassle for most users I'd say.

3) Make a dropdown list of some sort that lets you first select the profile you made, then select users you want to apply it to. Harder to code than other 2 options, but caters to existing users probably...

Tbh it all depends on coding whether option #1 will affect current users with custom profiles, as logically setting "default" profile should only affect new characters, no?

You could also incorporate ONLY option #2 for now via optional button to set X profile globally, and roll out option #1 later on. Perhaps with a pop-up message after update warning users? Again, all depends on coding limitations.

If i can think of any other ways, I will let you know.

Thank you for considering this, i and few other users i know truly appreciate it!!

It’s simply a matter of adding a single boolean parameter to the AceDB initialization:

Change line 132 of Postal.lua from…

self.db = LibStub("AceDB-3.0"):New("Postal3DB", defaults)

…to…

self.db = LibStub("AceDB-3.0"):New("Postal3DB", defaults, true)

This will keep all existing profiles in the ["profileKeys"] table, but make the "Default" profile the default for new characters.

I don't understand why the ACE developers didn't make this the default. It causes so much grief with many addons, because it seems many addon developers just don't know about this parameter (even though it's explained in the Ace API documentation).

Char-specific profiles as the default only make sense for a small number of addons (addons that deal with class/spec-specific stuff, for example). For the vast majority of addons, it's just a huge annoyance for multi-alt players.

And remember: Adding this parameter doesn't prevent anyone from creating a char-specific profile, it just sets a shared "Default" profile as default.

@ addon dev:

Is this still in the works or no longer planned?

Thanks :)

There have been some requests for Postal to support a default profile.  The original design of Postal was that each character got a unique profile by default.  This design was implemented a long time ago and is rather basic to the overall design.  I have spent some time thinking about how a default profile could be implemented while at the same time not breaking the profile per character's that people have already made and are used to.  I have come up with a solution that leaves the current profile per character in place by default.  However, the user can now go to the profile section and check "Default" on.  From that point onward all characters that don't have an existing profile will share the same default profile.  If you want this to apply to a character that already has a default profile, then simply delete that character's profile and next character login it will use the default profile.

There also was a request to have default profiles per realm.  This will not happen.

You can find this change in the latest release v4.0.0.