Word Gets Around

Hootus makes your recruitment invite for you

Recruitment settings used to ask you to go and fetch a Discord invite and paste it in, and not one guild ever did. Hootus now makes his own, permanent, pointed at your welcome channel, and separate from the guild link you hand to owls you already know. Whoever walks in on it gets greeted as the stranger they are rather than welcomed home, and Hootus knows they came off your apply page. No welcome channel or no permission to make invites, and he says so and links you to the fix, and your apply page simply leaves the Discord button off rather than pointing at nothing.

Where your arrivals actually came from

Every arrival now gets written down with the door they came through: your recruitment page, an officer link, a raid signup link, a group link, or somewhere else entirely. The recruitment page opens with the last thirty days of it, and how many of each went on to apply and get accepted. So "is the apply page worth the trouble" finally has an answer that is not a shrug. It starts counting from the next person in, not backwards.

Tell your apply page when you raid

Your apply page used to work your raid nights out from the last three months of runs, which meant it advertised a Wednesday you dropped in spring and hid the Tuesday your own blurb promises. Settings, Recruitment now has a week strip: tap the nights you raid, set a start and an optional finish, and the public page says exactly that instead of guessing. Times follow your server timezone, so there is nothing new to keep in sync. Leave it empty and the old guesswork carries on as before.

A checklist for the bits of recruitment you forgot

Recruitment settings opens with what is done and what is not: recruitment open, seats named, raid nights declared, blurb written, slug set, Discord invite ready, application questions chosen. Every tick is read off your real config, and anything still outstanding is a link that drops you on the exact control and puts your cursor in it. No percentage, no score, just the short list of what is left.

The board has a web page now, and it shows everything

One Discord message fits six groups, so on a busy realm nobody ever saw the seventh. The board now counts what it hides and links to hootus.dev/board, which lists the lot in cards or a table you can sort, with the same version, region, realm and kind filters your feed was set up with already applied. Tap any group for the full picture. No account, no bot, nothing to install.

A switch to keep your guild off the public listing

The web board shows the same groups the relay already shows, so it is on by default. If a listing on the open web is a step further than you meant to go, Settings, LFG groups has a toggle that takes your guild out of it while the Discord relay carries on. Either way it is times, seats and links only. Never character names, and never a soft reserve link, because a public reserve sheet is a wrecked reserve sheet.

Public raids can keep a comms invite without anyone remembering

A raid built in the planner never got a comms invite until the night it started, by which point nobody outside could see it anyway. Turn on the new setting under Invites and every raid you open to pickups gets one the moment it opens, revoked again when the raid closes. It is off unless you ask, because making an invite in your server is your call and not something a stranger subscribing to a feed should trigger.

The board says what a raid is asking for, when the leader said it

If you opened pug slots for a tank and two healers, that is what the community servers see, class and item level included. What Hootus will never do is work it out for himself. A raid seven short might want all seven as dps, and only the raid leader knows that, so when nobody has said, the post just gives the spot count and keeps quiet.

Post it again, without pretending to change something

There was no way to make a webhook redraw itself except editing a filter and editing it back. There is a button on each one now. The first post also lands the moment you create the webhook instead of waiting for the next sweep, and deleting a webhook cleans up the messages it left behind rather than abandoning them in the channel.

Raid nights short a body now reach the community servers too

The relay only ever carried dungeon and scenario groups, which is the smaller half of what anyone is actually looking for. Open a raid to public signups the way you already do and it goes out alongside them, with the spots left counted off your real roster and a signup link that needs no account at all. Community channels get their own switch for it, so a server that only wants the small stuff can say so.

Community servers can carry real groups now

If you run the realm server, the class server, or wherever everyone on your server ends up, Hootus can post recruiting groups straight into a channel of yours. Filtered to the realms and the version you care about, updating as spots fill, gone when the group closes. Nothing is installed and no permissions change hands. Head to the relay page, pick your filters, and Discord asks you which channel.

Groups open to PUGs now travel further

Nothing changes about how you post. Flip a group open to pickup players the way you already do, and it also reaches the community servers watching your realm. Leave the toggle alone and the group stays home. Whoever turns up still names their character, still gets checked on the armory, and still waits for the leader to say yes.

Three playstyles became two buttons

Hootus used to make you declare a playstyle before he would let you pick your application questions, then remember it forever so he could tell you when you had strayed from it. Nobody needed that. There are now two buttons, Community and Raiding, that fill the questions in and then get out of the way. Change whatever you like afterwards, nothing gets held against you. Hardcore was only Raiding with guild history and logs set to required, so it is those two switches now instead of a whole third identity.

Ten buried switches became four honest questions

The application settings hid ten toggles behind an Advanced flap, and half of them fed nothing. The addons checklist had no form left to draw. The addons confirmation on raid signup was written down and never read again. The parse link on raid signup never once collected a link, across every signup on record. All gone. Previous guilds and bosses killed this tier were only ever turned on together, so they are one Guild history question now, and the two logs switches are one choice of do not ask, optional, or required. What is left is four questions about applying, sitting out in the open. Your existing setup carries over exactly as you had it.

The raid signup note moved to raid settings

Whether Hootus asks for a note when someone signs up for a raid was filed under recruitment, which is nowhere near where anyone went looking for it. It now sits in Settings, Automation under Signup form, with your current choice carried across. Nothing changes for the people signing up.

Applicants tap your raid nights instead of typing a guess

Once you have declared your raid nights, the apply form stops asking for availability as an empty box and lists those nights to tap. The application then reads "Can make Tue. Can't make Thu." instead of whatever the applicant improvised at midnight, which is far easier to compare across a stack of them. No declared nights, no change: it stays a text box, because Hootus is not going to invent a schedule on your behalf.

Your apply page now sells the guild instead of just taking names

It used to be a title, three class chips and a login button, which tells a raider deciding on you almost nothing. It now opens with the seats you are actually short of, down to the spec, and backs that up with the nights you raid, taken from your raid series if you run one and from the last 90 days if you do not, plus what you have been clearing lately and how big the roster is. Every number is read off your own rows, so there is nothing new to fill in, and a guild with only a blurb still gets a page that looks deliberate. Links get stripped out of your blurb on the way to the public web, because a soft reserve sheet that strangers can find is a wrecked soft reserve sheet.

Relayed posts lead with a Discord invite, not a web link

Plenty of big community servers block outside links, so a post whose only way in was a hootus.dev address was fighting their automod. The invite goes first now and reads as something you do, the web address sits underneath in small print, and neither one promises what the other delivers. Your guild name is on the card too, because handing an evening to strangers is easier when you know whose evening it is.

The bits you actually read are no longer the smallest

Spots left, the start time and the realm were all set in the tiniest text on the card while a line explaining that titles are links took the best spot. That line is gone and the rest moved up a size. The realm in particular has been promoted, since it is the one thing that decides whether a reader can come at all.

The relay board stopped looking like a footnote

It was one long line of tiny text with the facts separated by dots, and it called a raid night a group. Every entry now leads with a big clickable name, the spots left in bold under it, and the start time as a real timestamp that reads in your own clock rather than "in a day". The quiet details moved to small print where they belong, and raids are called raids.

The relay form names your webhook for you

Three short fields were hiding behind an Advanced button that everyone had to open anyway, so the button is gone and the form is one straight column. Hootus also proposes a name off what you picked, something like Owl eyes on Thunderstrike, and stops the second you start typing your own. The summary underneath is a sentence now rather than three fragments held together with dots.

Raid nights joined the list instead of sitting on their own switch

Picking what a channel receives meant ticking chips for dungeons and PvP, then finding a separate toggle underneath for raids, which is a distinction that only made sense to the database. It is one list now, raid nights included. That also means a channel can ask for raids and nothing else, which the old pair of controls could not express at all.

Setting up a relay is two questions now

It had grown presets, a region picker, six kinds of chip and a paragraph explaining each one, which is a lot of ceremony for pointing a channel at a realm. It asks which version of Classic you play and which realms you care about, and that is the form. Region went entirely, because a realm already knows which one it is in. Everything else sits under Advanced with sensible defaults, so most people never open it.

Hootus stopped claiming to watch the summon stone at 4am

His status was eleven fixed lines on a shuffle, cheerfully mentioning Karazhan to guilds who have never set foot in it. Now it follows the night: a raid actually running, one about to pull with the minutes counting down, groups still short a healer, the roster coming back from Blizzard. When nothing is happening he goes back to being daft about it.

The in-Discord application stopped eating a question

Discord only allows five boxes in a form, and if you asked for guild history on top of everything else, Hootus quietly built six and threw the last one away. Applicants never saw it and you never knew it was missing. He now counts before he builds, and only folds previous guilds and tier progress into one box on the one arrangement where six would not fit.

Logs and guild history are their own fields on an application

They used to be glued onto the end of the experience answer as a wall of headings, so a blank logs box and a missing one looked identical. Each gets its own row on the review page now, and the logs link is a link you can actually click.

The realm picker stopped giving up on big communities

Pick two regions, or two flavours, and the realm list vanished and handed you a text box instead. It now searches across everything you picked and says which region a realm is in when that could be ambiguous. Classic Era realms were missing from the list entirely, which is fixed as well.

The relay stopped offering TBC servers a scenario filter

The filter list was hand-written rather than read off your flavour, so TBC channels were offered challenge modes and scenarios that TBC has never had. It now only shows the kinds of run your chosen flavours actually run. Realms are a proper searchable picker too, with real names instead of you guessing the hyphens in mirage-raceway.

You can get back to your webhooks now

The only way onto your own webhook list was to make another webhook, which is a silly thing to ask of someone who just wanted to change a filter. There is a sign-in button on the relay page now. It asks Discord who you are and nothing else.