Email-confirmed, active Ant Trail account with a valid Trail handle. Anonymous uploads are rejected.
Trail Upload
A narrow gate, on purpose.
Trail Upload will turn a player-selected Ant Trail character save into an account-owned profile. It will accept only the specific Ant Trail character file we expect, and only after it passes account, file, structure, history, and duplicate checks.
Current status
The public upload endpoint is still closed.
Validation designed; ingestion not enabled yet
The first public site does not read a WoW process, watch folders, inspect memory, intercept packets, or upload anything in the background. A future import begins only after the signed-in player deliberately chooses a file.
Upload safety gate
Every import must clear all of these checks.
Only the per-character AntTrail.lua SavedVariables file is eligible. ZIPs, folders, screenshots, TXT files, executables, and other Lua files are rejected.
The file must begin with the expected AntTrailCharDB data structure. An account-wide AntTrailDB file by itself is not enough to build a character profile.
The server checks the SavedVariables schema, Ant Trail version metadata, required character sections, and a strict size limit before parsing anything useful.
At least one recorded Life must be 7,200 seconds or longer. The check uses Ant Trail's own current-Life duration or completed-Life duration records.
File hashing, per-account rate limits, and duplicate rejection stop the same save from being submitted over and over.
What the uploader will accept
One file. No archives.
Expected: AntTrail.lua from that character's Ant Trail SavedVariables location. Upload remains disabled in this build.
The browser file extension is only a convenience check. The backend will inspect the filename, size, text encoding, Ant Trail root variable, supported schema, and qualifying Life independently. We will never trust a browser-supplied MIME type by itself.
Clear rejection messages
Fail closed, but tell the player why.
- File type not supported. Choose the character's AntTrail.lua file.
- This is not a character Ant Trail save. AntTrailCharDB was not found.
- This Ant Trail save is not supported yet. Its schema/version cannot be safely imported.
- More trail required. No recorded Life in this file has reached two hours yet.
- This trail was already imported. The file matches an existing import.
- Too many attempts. Wait before trying another upload.
- File too large. This save is outside the supported import limit.
Storage rule
Validate first; keep less.
The safer default is to use the uploaded file only long enough to validate and build the normalized Ant Trail profile, then discard the raw upload. The database stores the account-owned normalized profile and import metadata rather than treating everybody's raw SavedVariables as permanent file storage.
A limit of verification
This filters junk; it cannot prove a file was never edited.
WoW SavedVariables are ordinary files on the player's computer. A determined person can edit their own file. The two-hour rule, structure checks, consistency checks, account verification, duplicate hashes, and rate limits make casual bogus submissions much harder, but they are not cryptographic proof that every number came untouched from the game.
Compliance gate
Near-live remains a separate decision.
A website account and a manual file gate do not authorize an external program to inspect WoW. Any future near-live method still requires its own Blizzard-policy and technical-safety review before we enable it.