Hello,

It is well-established that the game uses a Lua constant defined in Interface\GlueXML\GlueStrings.lua known as SERVER_ALERT_URL to know which URL to hit in order to display Breaking News on the login screen (at least for 3.3.5a).

The most common methods currently are:

• Using a patched WoW executable to disable signature checks on game files and editing GlueStrings.lua
• Editing the system's hosts file to redirect the original Blizzard host to another server

Both of those methods are honestly pretty bad.

The only proper method I see is using a third-party executable that patches the URLs at startup, preferably reading the custom URLs from a user-configurable file. Prior to Battle for Azeroth, TrinityCore had a connection patcher that could theoretically do just that in addition to patching the world server auth process.

The question is: would this require Lua injection, or could it be done in a much simpler way, such as patching it in memory at launch time?
I'm not an expert in the field of patching, especially when it involves a Lua runtime running within the game process. I don't mind programming such patch but I'd like to know (from possibly higher-skilled people here) whether such a feature would be sane to do.