Might it be possible to make a command for manually entering a node for Gatherer? Format something like: Gatherer add category <category> .... adds a category like Fishing Gatherer add item <category> <item name> <icon>.... adds an itemname and an icon to the defined category like Sporefish School (yes, the icon would have to manually be added to the correct folder, if no icon is specified, a default "dot" would be added.) Gatherer add node <category> <item name> <location> ... adds a location for a specific item
This could be used for many things, more commonly fishing, but for NPC's, notes, etc. To take it one step further, a dropdown (or popup) menu for adding these.
The devs will need to weigh in on this, but I see a lot of potential for abuse here. There are already people who do this manually in their sv file and then send bogus nodes out to party members, etc. I believe there are plans to incorporate the tracking of fishing pools and gas clouds in gatherer, which would make this unnecessary for anything that Gatherer is really concerned with.
I have enough information in the Gather database already without having it track things like NPCs and hold notes. There are a multitude of map addons that will do that, my thought would be that bloating Gatherer with it could only make it less useful.
I'm not a dev, but those are my thoughts on the subject.
I can understand the concern for misuse. I know that fishing used to be incorporated but was removed due to problems. Possibly making manually entered nodes non-shareable. That way, the only person who has a file that would bloat is the one bloating it.
What I meant by bloating Gatherer is adding a bunch of functions that are not associated with the purpose of the addon, which is tracking gatherables in the game. Adding functions to make mapnotes or track NPCs with gatherer are not associated with that purpose, and it would bloat the addon.
Randall is precisely correct. This sort of functionality is out of scope for Gatherer, especially since there are plenty of general note addons that you could use to do the same thing. To my knowledge, most, if not all, of them have no problems coexisting with Gatherer.