SquidBots

A dashboard for a server running a thousand bots, and the watchman that goes with it.

It reads an AzerothCore database and the worldserver's own logs, and shows what the bots are actually doing: where they are, what they kill, which ones are stuck, what they find, and whether the server crashed while you slept. Built for Conquest of Azeroth with mod-playerbots, but nothing stops it from watching a plain AzerothCore realm.

English by default, French one click away. Dark and light. No framework, no build step, no external request: one Python file, one HTML page.

What it shows

Card	What it answers
Six figures	bots online, average level, kills, quests, levels gained, server uptime
Hunting pace	kills per hour, measured over a sliding half hour so the saves don't make it a sawtooth
Factions	Alliance against Horde, online only, with each side's average level
Roles	tanks, healers, damage
Where the bots are	the busiest zones, named from the server's own AreaTable.dbc
Today and yesterday	24 hours against the 24 before, in percent
Bots on the floor	how many are dead, read every ten minutes
Watch post	dead now, stuck bots (logged in, under the cap, not one point of experience in an hour), crashes, and the watchman's own journal
Level spread	the population by ten-level bands
Best experience gains	who actually progresses, per hour, over the last day
Most talkative	who talks, and how much
Class ranking	every class by average level, with its podium
Leaderboard	the ten best by experience, kills or quests
Spells cast	what the bots cast and how often it goes off
Rare finds	the epics the bots bring back, as they drop

Any bot name is clickable, and the search box opens the same sheet: class, specialization, role, zone, level, kills, quests, time played, experience per hour.

Install

Needs Python 3.9 or later (no packages to install) and the mysql client binary.

1. Copy squidbots.py, index.html and dashboard.example.json into a folder.
2. Rename the example to dashboard.json and fill in your paths. Keep your database password out of it: point mysqlArgs at a MySQL client file that holds the credentials, or drop the folder inside a repack that already has Settings/database.json.
3. Run it:

python squidbots.py

Then open http://localhost:8088. The page refreshes itself every twenty seconds.

With publishDir set, the dashboard also writes index.html and stats.json into that folder once a minute, for a web server to serve. That copy hides the memory and crash details: it only says whether the server runs.

Three cards need the worldserver to write a log

They stay empty, and say so, until you add these to worldserver.conf and restart the server.

Spells cast — needs mod-playerbots on the coa branch:

Appender.CoaBots = 2,4,1,CoaBots.log,a
Logger.playerbots.coa = 4,CoaBots

Most talkative — stock AzerothCore, chat logging off by default:

ChatLog.Enable = 1
Appender.Chat = 2,4,1,Chat.log,a
Logger.chat.say = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.yell = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.emote = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.channel = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.whisper = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.party = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.raid = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.guild = 4,Chat

Rare finds — needs the coa branch again, which logs one line per epic a bot loots:

Appender.BotLoot = 2,4,1,BotLoot.log,a
Logger.playerbots.loot = 4,BotLoot

The watchman

watch-and-restart.ps1 checks the worldserver every minute. It restarts it after a crash, and after a freeze — a world that stops updating keeps its process alive and writes nothing more, so a log untouched for five minutes is the tell. Before killing a frozen server it captures the thread stacks, which is usually what tells you why it froze.

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File watch-and-restart.ps1 -Server C:\my-server\server

It writes one line per event, and the dashboard shows that journal in the watch post card (incidentsLog in the settings).

It also keeps the chat log short. A thousand bots write about a megabyte an hour and nothing ever shortens it, so once an hour the watchman rewrites Chat.log in place, keeping the last 24 hours (-TrimLogs, -TrimHours, -TrimEveryMinutes). It rewrites rather than renames on purpose: the worldserver holds the file open, and a rename would leave it writing into a file no one can see any more.

Discord alerts are opt-in. Put a webhook URL in alerte-discord.txt next to the script and incidents are announced there; with no file, nothing is ever sent anywhere.

Notes

• footer in the settings replaces the line at the foot of the page, and "" removes it along with its links: handy while showing the page around before the sources are ready.

• Figures follow PlayerSaveInterval: a kill shows up when the character is saved, not the second it happens. Rates are measured over a sliding half hour for that reason.

• baseline.json, history.json and xp-history.json are written next to the script. Delete baseline.json to start the "gained since" figures over.

• Experience per hour needs an hour of readings, and "today against yesterday" needs two days. Both say so while they wait.

• Everything is read-only: the dashboard never writes to the game database.

Credits

• jealous-sound for Conquest of Azeroth
• mod-playerbots for the bots
• Written with Claude Code; reviewed, tested and run on a real server with a thousand bots.