Every patch Hootus has shipped

/demote, for the raider who quietly stopped raiding

Some people do not leave, they just stop turning up, and an indefinite away note kept them on the board forever like a coat nobody claims. `/demote member:@them` takes the Raider rank off, clears the away status, and pulls their absence off every upcoming raid. They keep their spot in the guild and stop counting as a raider, so the pings and the signup chasing stop with the rank. No DM goes out unless you add `message:`, because not every demotion wants announcing. Officers only, and the web demote button now clears away the same way.

The move-to-social DM sounds like Hootus again

It read like a form letter, and worse, anything an officer wrote in `message:` arrived looking like Hootus had said it. His half is in his own voice now and the officer's half is attributed to the officer, so you can tell who is telling you what.

The note Hootus kept about who raids is gone for good

He stopped reading it last release and now he has stopped keeping it. Everything it remembered was handed to the role cache on the way out, so returning raiders still get their role back and nobody has to ask for it again.

Your Discord role decides who is a raider, not a note Hootus kept

He had been keeping his own record of who raids alongside the role itself, written back when the role was decoration. The role has been the real answer since August, so he now reads it and stops keeping a second opinion that could drift from it.

Demoting someone no longer announces that they are back

Clearing an away note and coming back are the same act as far as Hootus was concerned, so demoting a raider who had been away forever posted that they were back and off the away board, and wrote it into the guild feed as if an officer had marked them back. They are not back, they were demoted. The board still drops them, he just stops narrating the wrong event. Coming back the ordinary way still gets said out loud.

Closing a raid to PUGs now actually closes it

Hootus was handing out a PUG sign-up invite on every raid, guild-only ones included, and leaving it live after a raid leader switched pickups back off. The invite is now minted only for a raid that is genuinely open to outsiders, it vanishes from the post the moment you close it, and the link anyone already copied stops working. The comms invite at raid time is untouched.

Hootus remembers the roles you had when you leave

He only wrote down your roles when one of them changed, so for plenty of people he had a partial list or none at all. That matters on the day you come back, because Discord itself remembers nothing. Every sweep now records the full set for everyone, so a returning raider gets their role back without asking.

The raider box you tick at /verify is kept separately from the role

Saying yes to are you an active raider and actually holding the Raider role were stored in the same place, which worked only because they were usually the same. For anyone still waiting on an officer they are not the same at all, so the answer you gave now stands on its own until somebody approves you.

A raider inactivity check that had never once run is gone

It looked for members filed at a rank nothing had written since the ranks were removed, so it found nobody every time it woke up. Removing it also fixed a stale-verification query that was filtering on the same dead field.

You decide whether a raid comes with a PUG invite

Hootus has been minting a PUG invite for every raid he touches, whether or not you wanted strangers in that one. Raid automation now has a switch for which way round it goes. Leave it on and nothing changes. Turn it off and raids stay guild-only until an officer asks, with /raid pug-invite enabled:on or the PUG invite option in the planner's advanced settings. Either way, any single raid can go the other way without touching the setting.

The PUG switch only decides whether Hootus goes looking

Yesterday's switch covered too much. Turning it off also took away the invite a raid lead pastes into /2 when they are one body short ten minutes before the pull. It now means exactly one thing: whether Hootus recruits PUGs on his own while signups are open. The comms invite still turns up when the raid starts, every time, so grabbing a stranger out of chat still works. Switching PUGs off in Features is still the one switch that stops all of it. The old 'always give public raids a comms invite' toggle on the LFM page is gone, folded into this one.

Your character keeps the capital letter you gave it

Type your name in lower case when you verify and Hootus used to keep it that way forever, on the roster, in your nickname and everywhere else he mentioned you. When he already knows the proper spelling, from the guild roster or the armory check he just did, he uses that instead. He will not invent a capital he has not seen, so an unusual name stays exactly as you wrote it.

The pages Hootus greets strangers on load quicker

The zone artwork behind the public pages was arriving as full-size photographs, four hundred kilobytes of it on the front page alone. It is now sized and converted for whatever screen is asking, which is about a fifth of the weight for the same picture.

One theme, and it is the one that actually worked

The light theme is gone, and the switch in the corner with it. Almost nobody used it and it had quietly rotted: priest names came out white on a white background in the planner, which is a fine way to lose a healer. If you had it set to light you are now on dark, which is where everyone else already was.

This page stopped being a megabyte

Every change Hootus had ever shipped was loading at once, all six hundred and ninety six of them. Named patches and fix rounds have their own pages now, so the list opens at a fifth of the weight and you can link somebody straight to the one you mean.

The planner, raid board and group finder open quicker

Hootus was asking the database about every raid and every group one at a time, which on a busy guild meant hundreds of questions to draw a single page. He asks once and gets the lot back now.

The group finder board opens faster

Hootus was asking the database about every group on the board one at a time, twice each. He asks once for all of them now, so the page stops making you wait on a pile of questions he already knew the answer to.

Roster updates land about three times faster

Hootus asked Blizzard about one character, waited, then asked about the next one, all the way down a roster of hundreds. He now asks about six at a time over a faster connection, so specs, item level and portraits catch up in a third of the time. Nothing about the result changed, only how long you wait for it.

New runtime, newer parts, a smaller bag

The bot and the site moved to Bun 1.4 and a newer Next, and a hundred-odd outdated packages came along. You will not see any of it. The deploy is a third smaller, the bot starts quicker, and the list of known security holes in what Hootus is built from went from a hundred and three down to one.

The phone planner leads with the people who said yes

Open the player list on a phone and the tentative and absent piles were sitting there fully unrolled, pushing everyone who had actually signed up off the bottom of the screen. Both now start rolled up with their headcount on the header, and the list you are building the lineup from scrolls on its own instead of running off the end of the sheet. Tap either pile to open it.

The planner stopped turning your tanks into DPS on a phone

Adding somebody to a group from a phone filed them as DPS regardless of what they signed up as, so officers were dragging tanks and healers back to their own roles every week and anyone who did not spot it turned up on the lineup as DPS. It now uses the role they signed up with unless you pick a different one, and pulling somebody off the bench puts them back on their own role instead of the nearest one to hand.

The headcount finally agrees with the groups underneath it

Someone who had dropped out kept their seat in the maths. The header said 23 while the parties below it showed 20, the grid view drew them into a party the list view had left empty, and the copy-paste export handed you a name to invite who had already said no. Every one of those now counts the people who are actually turning up.

Auto fill stopped seating people who said they were not coming

One click could drop four absent players straight into Group 1, filling it in the database while the screen still showed four free slots. They then blocked that group against every later fill and against the lineup post. Auto fill now only reaches for people who are coming.

An accent is part of the name, not a decoration

Hootus folded Stocchi, Stocchí, Stocchì and Stócchi into one person. They are four different characters with four different classes, and he picked whichever one the database handed him first, so verifying somebody or setting their main could land on entirely the wrong character. He now reads the name the way Blizzard writes it.

Marking someone tentative no longer makes them disappear

Drag a player who is already sorted into a group onto the tentative pile and they left the group without turning up anywhere else. The change saved correctly, they just stopped being on screen. They now appear under Tentative, which is where you put them.

The shared raid link keeps the private parts private

The read-only link you paste into Discord was handing out rather more than the roster. Decline reasons, review notes and a pile of internal ids all came along for the ride. It now carries what the page actually draws and nothing else.

Dropping out after you have been put in a group now sticks

Marking yourself absent kept you out of the lineup, right up until someone had already sorted you into a party. After that Hootus went on printing you in Party 2 as a tank. He now checks whether you are actually coming before he writes the list, and an absence no longer holds a role open that nobody is filling.

Two runs of the same raid have two raids worth of seats

Book Kara twice in one night and Hootus counted the seats once. The morning ping and /raid status read 30/25 instead of 30/50, and locking the raid offered to bench five people who had a seat the whole time. He counts every run now.

A new raid respects the settings you already set

Turning off the role tally, or turning on alt offers, only took effect once somebody signed up and nudged the post. Until then the fresh raid showed the old behaviour and the setting looked broken. Both now apply the moment the raid goes up.

The posted lineup no longer counts people who said no

Marking someone absent pulled them out of the groups in the planner, but the picture posted to Discord and the shared raid view still had them sitting in Group 1. Absent and maybe are now left out of both, so the lineup you hand out is the one you are raiding with.