[GUIDE] Challenge Helper

This guide will show you how to configure a tool to make a sound everytime someone posts a challenge or master you're interested in the 820 channel. With this tool I was able in last league to not be attending to the 820 channel all the time and just check it when I hear the sound. And it can help to mitigate the spamming of poople searching for challenges (never work anyway!).


We'll use a tool called SnakeTail that parses (analyzes) any text file and highlight any pattern you want.





1- Install SnakeTail from here: http://snakenest.com/snaketail/



2- Open it and go to File -> Open File... and search for Client.txt in your Path Of exile/logs subfolder.

Enter any channel and you'll see all the actitivy on the channel in the tool. You can even test it just typing something on the chat window.






3- Go to Edit -> View Options... then go to External Tools tab and click on Add... Here you'll add the sound you wanna use to warn you. Type any name and use powershell for the command. In Arguments field you must use something like this:

"

-c (New-Object Media.SoundPlayer "C:\Windows\Media\ring.wav").PlaySync();

As you can see, I'm using a sound included in Windows default installation. You can really use any .wav file you want. Remember to check Hide Window.




4- Go to Edit -> View Options... then go to Keyword Highlight tab and click on Add... Here you'll add a line for every piece of text you wanna be warned. For example, type bravalo. Uncheck Make Case Sensitive, check Launch External Tool and select the one you just created.



Repeat this for every challenge you want. You can use regular expressions to match your text. If you don't have any idea about that, is enough knowing that ".*" is equivalent to any number of any characters so you can use things like "free.*zana" or "wild.*vorici". Remember to remove any challenge you already have. If you add more than 6-8 challenges can be a little anoying, but is up to you.




5- Save your session going to File -> Save Session... and save again everytime you change something.


Some notes:
- You must be in the channel all the time for the tool to work because it only processes what you see on the screen. You don't need to take attention to the chat though, so you can shrink the chat font and box size, just search for the it in the UI options.

- If you get false positives because some guy is spamming with LF bravalo, just ignore him. It'll make your ignore list grow really fast, but with some luck we'll have a better experience with challenges this league :)

- It would be nice to have this feature integrated in the game. We already got item filtering and is even easier at a technical level

- Here you got all the images in a single album: http://imgur.com/a/bJBHc

As a linux system administrator I do this all the time to monitor events on log files and works really well.

Happy challenging!