Who feels like running some good old-fashioned conspiracy theories? Because this one is a classic insofar as no matter what you believe the motivation was, you’ll be in conspiracy theory territory! World of Warcraft: Classic received a small hotfix that made the /who function a protected function, meaning that addons cannot automatically call the function and it must instead be manually used by the player. No official post explaining this change or the rationale behind it has been offered.
Players have already come up with two theories, of course. The first theory is derived from the obvious effect that this change breaks any census addons, thus preventing players from getting a clear picture of player counts, faction balances, and so forth. The other theory is that this is a workaround to prevent layer-hopping antics using the /who function to identify your current layer. With the lack of an official post on the matter, it’s up to individuals to decide whether the goal was to break census functionality, break layer-hopping functionality, or both. Until we get an official post, anyhow.
