Which Link Was That

Practice raids are in the raid list now, so you can make one anywhere

Start `/raid create`, type test in the raid box, and every raid comes back with a [TEST] in front of it. Pick one and you get the real thing to play with, in whatever channel you are standing in: signup buttons that work, a roster that fills up, the lot. What it will not do is ping anybody, chase anybody, or turn up in attendance, stats or logs. Two ways to get one now, this or a dedicated test channel, and you do not have to set anything up to use this one.

`/raid create` can finally tell you where it is posting

Hootus guessed the channel from the day of the week, and when the guess ran out of road he told you to use the `channel` argument, which he had never had. Now he has. Pick a channel and the raid goes there, no guessing. Leave it alone and he guesses exactly as before. Handy with the new test channel: type test, pick it, and you get a practice raid without leaving the channel you are standing in.

People arrive out loud now

Your welcome channel is locked to new arrivals, which meant the only person who ever saw someone turn up was the person turning up. Everyone else found out when a stranger said something in general three days later. Hootus now says so in general when a member joins, when a guest comes through the social link, and when someone who used to be here comes back, so you can actually greet them. PUGs are left out on purpose, five of them on a Tuesday would bury the channel. The existing welcome announcement switch turns the lot off.

A link for people who only want a look around

Recruiting someone meant asking them to commit before they had seen how you talk to each other on a Tuesday. There is now a social invite that hands them the Guest role on the way in: they can read the place, join in, and see the raid board, but never raid chat, loot or anything with officers in it. Hootus DMs them asking for their character so they get their name and class colour like everyone else, and that costs them nothing, it does not sign them up and it does not make them a member. He refuses to make the link at all if your Guest role is missing or is secretly the same role as Member, because that one hands out the keys.

Test raids are a channel now, not a hidden option

There has always been a way to make a practice raid, and almost nobody could use it. It was a `test` tickbox on `/raid create` described as dev only, and if you were not on the bot owner's list Hootus quietly made you a real raid instead and mentioned it afterwards. The tickbox is gone. Pick a test channel in Settings, Channels, and every raid created in it is a practice raid: titled [TEST], no pings, no reminders, no auto-lock nagging, and kept out of attendance, stats and logs. Point a new officer at that channel and let them run the whole thing wrong a few times where it costs nothing.

The raid post stopped offering two front doors

The signup post in Discord was listing the public web link underneath the buttons, which is a strange thing to show people who are already in your server and already looking at a button that says sign up. The post is Discord now, buttons only. The web link is still yours to share wherever you actually want strangers to find it.

The guest link is just there now

It needed making by hand the first time, which is a strange thing to ask of a link that never changes. Hootus makes it himself alongside the member and recruitment ones, so all three are sitting on Settings, Invite links waiting to be copied. He still refuses if your Guest role is missing or is quietly the same role as Member, because that link would hand over the guild. The guest welcome DM picked up more of his usual nonsense too, and there is a Guest welcome box under custom messages if you would rather write your own.

Every standing invite on one page

The links were scattered across two settings pages and a slash command, and none of them said what they did to whoever followed them. Settings, Invite links now lists all three side by side with the job written underneath, a copy button, and a regenerate that tells you plainly it kills the old one. `/manage pug-invite` and `/manage guest-invite` are retired, the page does both. The page that used to be called Invites was never about invites, it was your LFM defaults, so it is now called LFM posts and lives at a name that says so.

The link you paste in game now says what it does

It went out labelled Comms invite and left you to work the rest out. It now tells you what it is for, that whoever follows it lands straight in the raid thread and voice ready to go, and that it does nothing whatsoever for someone already sitting in your server, which is the part that has cost raid leaders the most time at 20:29. Same wording wherever it turns up, instead of the two versions that had quietly drifted apart.

Hootus stopped rearranging servers he had only just arrived at

Two of his hourly rounds were happy to redo an entire server in one pass. The PUG sweep treated a role it had never seen anyone use as seven days idle, so on a server that had been running long before he turned up he would strip the role from everyone holding it and DM them all about it. The verification gate would tag most of a membership as Unverified because it did not recognise roles nobody had told him about, then shut the welcome channel again every hour if you opened it back up. Both rounds now count first and refuse to act if the answer is most of your server, telling your officers instead. A PUG he has no history with is left alone, because that role predates him. The welcome channel gets set up once and then stays how you leave it.

The invite for web signups was going nowhere

Someone signs up on your public link, an officer approves them, and Hootus DMs them the Discord invite. Except Discord will not let a bot DM a stranger it shares no server with, which is every single person who signs up on the web. The message bounced, the owl said nothing, and the raider sat there waiting for a DM that could never arrive. The invite now sits on the signup page itself the moment you approve them, so they collect it from the page they were already looking at. If a DM does bounce, he says so in your PUG approval channel with the link attached, so you can hand it over yourself.

The raid invites Hootus kept forgetting to tidy up

When a raid closed he revoked its invite and deleted his note of it, in that order, and did not check the first part worked. One failed revoke and the link lived on with nothing left pointing at it. One guild had twenty-eight of these, the oldest from five months ago, still open on raid channels for raids that ended in spring. He now keeps the note when the revoke fails so he can try again, and sweeps up anything already loose every six hours. He will only ever revoke his own invites, never yours, and never one that is registered on the invite links page.