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Uploading and Analyzing Your First Log

Once you've enabled combat logging in-game (see the getting started guide if you haven't), uploading is a one-click flow. The interesting part is choosing how the log gets handled — Epog Logs offers two upload modes that exist for very different reasons. Pick the wrong one and you'll either accidentally publish a private parse or silently miss out on the rankings page. This guide walks through both.

The Upload button

Click the ⬆ Upload button in the top-right of the header on any page. A modal opens with a file picker and a Public/Private toggle at the top. Drag your WoWCombatLog.txt in, or browse for it. Then choose your mode — that choice is the most important part.

Public mode

Public is the default and the one most people want. The full log is uploaded to the server, parsed, and stored in the database. Every player's damage, healing, casts, and deaths become part of the public dataset, and their parses appear on the rankings page, your guild page, and contribute to the progression leaderboard.

To upload publicly you need to:

• Be signed in with Discord (so we know who's responsible for the upload — see the privacy policy for what we store).
• Have at least one character linked on your profile so the system can match the log to a known player.
• Either be in a guild that's set as your primary, or tick the PUG checkbox if it was a pickup raid.

The server figures out the rest: it auto-detects which server the log came from, which character matches your linked one, and which guild to attribute it to. You only have to type a name for the log (something like "Ony farm — week 12" works fine).

Private mode

Private is for when you want to inspect a log without putting it on the leaderboard. Maybe it's a bad pull, a learning night, a parse you don't want public, or simply a log from someone else's raid you're curious about.

In private mode the raw log is sent to the server over HTTPS, parsed in a worker thread, and the parsed structure is returned to your browser. Nothing is written to disk or the database. No row in the logs table, no entries in parses, no contribution to rankings. The result lives only in your tab's session storage — close the tab and it's gone, and the URL can't be shared.

This is the mode of choice for theorycrafting, debugging a bad parse, or analyzing a log a friend shared with you privately. Private uploads don't require a Discord login because nothing persists.

What happens during the parse

The server-side parser walks every event in the log line by line, identifying which entities are players (and their classes/specs from the spells they cast), which are pets (and which player owns them), where boss fights start and end, and what damage and healing each player contributed to each fight. Boss fight detection requires at least 60 seconds of combat plus a high-damage enemy — that filters out trash and most wipe attempts where the boss never engaged.

For larger logs (50–200 MB), this takes anywhere from a few seconds to a minute. You'll see a progress indicator while it runs. Don't close the tab — you'll lose the result.

Finding your parse afterwards

When the upload finishes, you're redirected to the log viewer page (/log.html?id=<n> for public uploads). You'll see a fight list down the side, damage and healing tables for the selected fight, talent breakdowns, and timeline charts. Click any player's name to open their parse modal, which shows their best percentile vs. the global top of their class.

If your log gets auto-grouped with other logs from the same raid night (within 6 hours, sharing players and fights), you can switch to the merged group view to see the full raid as one unit — useful for cross-night progression analysis.

Rate limits and tips

• The combined upload limit (logs + armory) is currently 3 successful uploads per IP per hour. Plenty for a normal raid night; intended only to stop spam.
• Logs over 300 MB are rejected — split your raw log into per-night files if you have to.
• For best results, make sure Advanced Combat Logging is enabled in the game's Network options before raiding (covered in the previous guide). Pet damage attribution and shield absorbs both depend on it.
• You can re-upload the same file later — the dedup logic keys on log content, so it won't double-count.

Next step

Once you have a parse open, the next thing most people want to know is what those colored percentile badges actually mean. How parse percentiles work explains the methodology and the color tiers.