Come On In

Hootus reads your raid logs and works out who was actually there

Drop a Warcraft Logs link in your raid logs channel and he takes it from there. No command, no form. He works out which raid it belongs to, records who was in each fight and which bosses went down, and ticks the message when he is finished. Point him at the channel in Settings, Channels first, because he reads that one and nothing else. Attendance stops meaning who sat in voice and starts meaning who was in the room, and the planner now shows you the difference. If he cannot tell which raid a log belongs to, he asks you rather than guessing, and you pick it off a list right there in the channel. Tell him it was not one of your raids and he drops it. You can also attach one by hand with /raid log or from the planner.

A progression page that knows Karazhan is eleven bosses

Every log you attach now adds up. Progression shows what the guild has killed together, instance by instance, with first-kill dates and how many times each boss has gone down, and your own boss list turns up on your character page. It counts the Opera Event once, because you only ever get one a week, and it does not count the trash row Blizzard leaves in the loot tables. On TBC there is no other way to get this: Blizzard shipped achievements in Wrath, so the logs are the only record there has ever been.

A kill only counts if enough of you were in the room

Hootus keeps every log now, even the ones from nights that were never a raid in the first place. What he will not do is credit the guild for a pug that one of you happened to join. He counts how many people in each log are yours and says so out loud, and a boss only lands on the progression page when at least five of you were there and you were at least half the raid. Disagree? The number is written on the report so you can see exactly why he called it.

Where the log and the attendance sheet disagree, you get to settle it

Marking attendance is a best guess made at the end of a long night. The log is a measurement. So Hootus now shows you both, side by side on the planner: who the log puts in the fights with no credit, and who is credited without appearing in a single one. One button fixes it, another leaves it exactly as it is and stops asking. He never overwrites anyone's marking on his own, and telling him to leave one alone sticks.

Applicants finally hear back

Decide on an application anywhere, Discord buttons or the dashboard, and Hootus DMs the applicant. Accepted gets the invite link and the reminder that /verify is the step that actually puts them on the roster. Interview names the officer who asked. Declined is short, kind, and carries your note to them, never the reason you typed for the officers. One DM per decision, no chasing, and withdrawing stays silent because they already know. If the DM bounces or they never joined the server, the recruitment channel gets told so someone can pass it on by hand.

The apply page remembers who applied

Lose the status link and you used to lose the application. Now the apply page recognises you the moment you sign in with Discord and shows your application in place of the form: where it got to, what the officers said, what you told them, and the next thing to do. Accepted owls get the invite and the /verify nudge, withdrawn owls get a way back in, and the old status link keeps working for anyone holding one.

Applicants land on a perch instead of the doormat

Anyone who turns up in your Discord with an application already in gets the Applicant role on arrival, and the welcome message points them at the new Applicant perch channel where they can ask things and an officer can answer. Wire it up in Settings, Channels, or skip it and nothing changes. Apply first and join later, or join first and apply later, Hootus works it out either way. The role comes off by itself when the application is accepted and verified, declined, or withdrawn, so you never end up with a shelf of stale applicants.

Applicants finally find out what happened

Approving from the dashboard used to tell the applicant precisely nothing, while the confirm box cheerfully claimed otherwise. Every decision now lands on their status link: where it stands, how it got there, and what to do next. Accept someone and they get the invite link, the server invite and a nudge that /verify is the step that actually puts them on the roster. Decline someone and it says so, plus whatever you chose to tell them.

A message box for the applicant, separate from the one for your officers

Approve, interview and decline all take an optional message that the applicant reads word for word. Your reason and your notes stay where they belong, between officers, and Hootus now says which is which instead of pretending the rejection reason was ever delivered.

Apply to join, right there in the welcome message

Someone could wander in on an invite, get greeted, pick a role, and never once be offered a way to actually join. The welcome message now carries an Apply to join button whenever you are recruiting and the arrival is not already one of yours. If they already applied and left answers blank, the button says so and asks for those instead. Nobody is chased, nagged, or DMed about it.

Setup builds the perch instead of describing it

Setup made an Applicant role and then left it with nowhere to sit, because the perch was a channel you had to go and create by hand. Tell the wizard you are recruiting and it now builds #the-perch with the rest, locked to applicants and officers and wired up on the spot. Already have one? It gets adopted, not duplicated.

Your guild page got a proper address

It lives at /guilds/your-slug now, because it was never just a form, it is your shop window. Every apply link you have already handed out still lands in the right place, and always will, so nothing you pasted into a DM or a forum goes stale. The officer queue moved to /applications, which is what it has always been, and the tip jar is /donate instead of squatting next to the page where you actually get help.

Applicants find out which officer wants a word

The status page used to promise a DM from nobody in particular. It now names the officer who asked for the interview, by the Discord handle the applicant can actually search for, so they know whose message to wait on. If that officer has since left the server, it goes back to naming no one rather than naming someone unfindable.

The gem checker has been put out of its misery

It cheerfully announced "All gems socketed" for everyone, including people with nothing socketed, because the armory never tells us where the sockets are. An audit that can only ever say yes is not an audit, so it is gone. Enchants, empty slots and PvP gear are all still checked, and those ones actually look.

You can back out of a character you picked by mistake

Once the armory found your character you were stuck with it, class, spec, role and all, unless you knew about a grey line of text. The form now uses the whole width, character on one side and questions on the other, with Different character and Edit by hand sitting right under the portrait. Edit by hand keeps everything the armory found and hands you the pencil. The submit button also went back to being the same yellow as everything else, instead of quietly turning Warlock purple.

Item level survives the trip to your officers

The apply page read it off the armory, glued it onto the front of the experience answer, and then dropped the lot if you had turned that question off. It now has a column of its own, gets picked up in Discord too, and turns up on the officer card, the review page and your dashboard queue instead of a permanent red no ilvl.

The apply form stopped hiding at the bottom

Apply now used to drop you at the foot of the page, past every stat and raid night. Hero, then the form, then your guild pitch, all full width, phone and desktop alike. The form only appears once you are signed in, so the hero button says plainly that applications run through Discord and it takes you there. Signed out, nothing pretends to be a form you can fill in.

Applying in Discord asks what the apply page asks

Two doors into the guild, two different sets of questions, and two piles of applications you could not lay side by side. Hootus now reads the same question settings whichever way someone comes in, stores the answers in the same places, and asks why you are applying with the same seriousness the web form does. Half-finished applications get a Finish your application button that asks only for the blanks, and the officer card in Discord updates itself when they fill them in.

Voice stopped counting as attendance for the rest of the evening

A raid nobody closed properly left the door open for six hours after the start time, so anyone who drifted into raid voice at midnight got filed as having attended. That is how a 25-man ended up with 37 people present. The window now follows the raid's own length instead of a flat six hours.

The Gargul import stopped eating loot

Clear never worked, it just failed quietly. Importing from Discord wiped every instance rather than the one you meant. And if an item lookup fell over halfway through, your old loot was already gone with nothing to put back. The delete and the insert now happen together or not at all, a Discord import refreshes an open planner like the web one always did, and the Import button stopped showing up for people who were never allowed to press it.

A character whose realm turned up late stopped counting as two

When Hootus filed a character before he had pinned down its realm, learning the realm later filed it again rather than filling in the blank. Same name, same class, two rows, and you would meet the pair on your own profile as your own alt. Now the placeholder gets absorbed instead of orphaned. He has also stopped handing out armory links for characters whose realm he never worked out, since those only ever led to a page apologising.

Signups ask which character instead of assuming your main

Press DPS with a Paladin main and a Shaman alt and Hootus signed the Paladin every time, and your Shaman never got a look in. Now, when more than one of your characters could fill the role, he asks, one button each, with the spec each would go in as written on it. Your last-used character sits first, so the usual answer is one click. Tentative, Absent and Withdraw finally act on whoever you actually signed up as, and swapping role keeps that character instead of quietly reverting to your main.

Armory pages called every Shaman a healer

On Classic Era and TBC, Blizzard does not hand out an active spec the way MoP does, so armory pages left the main spec blank, guessed a role from the class alone, and then cheerfully showed the offspec as a dual. An Enhancement Shaman read as a bare Shaman with a Restoration badge. Hootus now works the spec out of the talent trees like he does everywhere else, so the page says Enhancement Shaman, the dual only shows when there really is one, and the PUG lookup fills in the spec instead of leaving the dropdown empty.

Armory lookups got a doorman

Character pages are public on purpose, since /gear and the PUG buttons hand the link to people who have never signed in. What they should not do is take any realm and name you type and pass it straight through to Blizzard. Now the flavour, realm and character name have to look like real ones or the page is simply not there, and one visitor can only ask for so many characters a minute. Same pages, same links, far harder to point at your guild's Blizzard quota.

Permission warnings stopped reading a mute as a favour

Bot health described every personal channel override as a grant, so the thirty raiders who had been quietly denied Send Messages showed up as if someone had done them a kindness. It now names what was allowed and what was blocked, warns you that clearing the overrides lifts the denials too, and stops swallowing permissions it did not have a label for. The PUG access panel had the same blind spot from the other end: a channel where the PUG role is explicitly blocked was dropped from the list entirely, indistinguishable from one nobody had touched. Both now say what is actually going on.

Inviting someone for an interview from the review page

If Interview had already been pressed in Discord, the matching button on the review page sat there greyed out saying nothing, so pressing it did precisely nothing. It is gone when there is nothing left to do, replaced by the interview stage itself and a link straight into the applicant's DMs. It is also called Invite for interview now, because that is what it does. And if another officer got there first, Hootus says so instead of cheerfully reporting work he never did.

Interview stopped ending the conversation

Pressing Interview in Discord marked the application and then greyed out every button, including the two you need once the chat is over. Interviewing is not a verdict, so the card now turns amber, says it is still waiting on a decision, and keeps Approve and Reject live. Those two still lock it for good. And if another officer or the dashboard got there first, your stale card fixes its own buttons the moment you press one.

Gear stats stopped reading zero

Hootus was looking for armour, defence and weapon speed in the wrong pocket, so every one of them came back as nothing. Tanks got the caster stat line because a defence of zero is not very tanky, melee saw MH DPS 0.0, and the resistance panel on the website never appeared at all. All of it reads properly now, on Classic Era, TBC and MoP alike, and your tier set name turns up next to the piece instead of a blank.

The armory knows your spec on Classic Era and TBC realms too

Outside Pandaria the armory never volunteers a spec, so the apply page came back with your class and a blank where Affliction should have been, then guessed your role off the class alone and offered every Paladin the tank slot. Hootus now counts your talent points the same way the roster sync always has, so the spec lands on the form, the role suggestion matches it, and your officers see it on the application.

Members can read the apply page again

Signing in on your own guild's apply page used to wipe it and leave a bare 'already a member' line, so nobody in the guild could see their own hero, seats or raid nights. The page stays put now, with a short note where the form would be.

Both apply doors agree on who is already in

Applying in Discord always refused a character sat on your guild roster. The website did not, so a guildie could apply to their own guild from the public page and land in the officer queue. The website checks the same two things now, membership and the roster, and says so while you type the name instead of after you have written an essay.

Notes on an application are no longer write-only

Every rejection reason and reopen note went into the application and was never shown again, so working out why someone was turned down meant digging through Discord. The review page now carries an Officer log with who moved it, when, what they wrote to the applicant, and every note on file.

Withdrawing an application tells somebody

It used to change one word in the database and stop. The officer post kept live Approve and Decline buttons on an application the person had walked away from, and pressing one said it was already withdrawn by someone. It now closes the post, names who walked, writes it into the log, and kills the invite link if one had already gone out.

Hootus stopped chasing you for answers you already skipped

Leave an optional question blank and he would keep offering Finish your application forever, in the welcome message and on the board, for a box you were told you could ignore. He now remembers which questions you were actually shown, so a skipped answer counts as answered and the prompt goes away. It only comes back if your guild turns a brand new question on, which is the one time there is genuinely something new to ask.

The Recruitment switch in Features actually switches something

Turning it off did precisely nothing. The apply page stayed live, the board kept its Apply button, and so did the welcome message. Off now means off everywhere, and Settings, Recruitment stays the day to day open or closed switch on top of it.

Signing in with Discord drops you back on the form

It used to land you at the top of the apply page on the long number version of the link, with the form somewhere below. You now come back to your guild address, at the form, where you left off.