Nobody here is in your guild. Post the raid anyway.
The realm Discord, the pug group, the LFG server, the place four guilds worth of people ended up. Tell Hootus this is a community and he stops asking which WoW guild you run, stops syncing a roster you do not have, and stops chasing anyone to verify.
Is this your guild’s Discord, or a place where people from lots of guilds gather?
- My guild's DiscordYour guild's Discord. People here are meant to be in the guild, and I check.
- A place where lots of guilds gatherA community. People from lots of guilds, or none. Nobody has to be one of yours.
Answer community and the roster half of Hootus never starts. Answer guild and everyone still gets held against your armory roster, the way it has always worked.
The roster half never starts.
A guild bot spends most of its day checking people against a roster. Who is on it, who fell off it, who turned up in Discord and never verified. On a community server there is no roster, so that whole half is not turned down. It is never started.
What is left is the part you came for. A raid post, signups that know the class, a lineup, and something that closes the thing when it is done.
- No WoW guild, no realm. Setup still offers the step, and on a community you walk straight past it. Nothing later needs a guild name, so nothing later breaks for want of one.
- No roster sync. The hourly Blizzard roster pull does not run here at all. No roster means nobody comes out a guest for carrying the wrong guild tag, and no stale-roster warnings.
- No welcome gate. People arrive and they are in. Hootus does not park them behind a verify button, and the sweep that chases the ones who never pressed it skips this server.
- Nothing about rosters in the check-ins. The nags about a missing welcome channel, an unlinked WoW guild, a realm that is set wrong and a roster that stopped loading are all switched off, because none of them is your problem.
- A different definition of working. A guild server is not working until someone verifies. Here Hootus counts raids posted, raids with names on them, and runs that finished.
A class read off the armory, not off a message.
Put a raid up open to anyone and one character on file is the whole requirement. No guild, no roster, no verification queue. Hootus still asks Blizzard what that character is before the click sticks, so the tank spot goes to something that can tank.
- Class comes off the armory, so a Warrior clicking healer gets told no
- Connected realms are resolved, so the character is found where it actually lives
- One character belongs to one Discord account, so nobody signs up as somebody else
- Neither route asks which guild the character is in, or whether it is in one
Hootus keeps the two routes apart on the character itself. A Battle.net import is proof of ownership. A typed name is proof the character exists and nothing more, and he does not pretend otherwise.
Ragefire Chasm at half eleven.
Community servers do not run a tier, they run whatever is on tonight. A Deadmines group because three people hit level 18 in the same week. Wailing Caverns because somebody asked in general and got four yeses before midnight.
/lfg puts that up with the roles you still need, its own thread, and a pinned board so it is still findable an hour later. Molten Core on Sunday goes up with /raid and gets the whole raid night, open to anyone with a character.
- Dungeon groups. Post the run, say which roles you are short of, let it fill while you finish the quest you were on.
- Raid nights open to anyone. The same raid post a guild uses, created with public on, so the membership check never enters into it.
- A board that stays current. One pinned message listing what is open. Groups appear when they open and drop off when they close, so nothing on it is stale.
- Pings people asked for. Members pick their own tags, so the healer who wants heroics hears about heroics and nobody else gets an @here.
Judged on raids, not on how many people verified.
On a guild server the first milestone is one verified member, and Hootus will keep mentioning it until it happens. Here that milestone would never arrive, so he counts something a community server can actually reach.
A raid goes up
The first thing Hootus looks for is a raid on the calendar. Not a verified member, not a roster of the right size. A raid, because that is the reason anyone opens your server.
Someone signs up
A raid with names on it is the thing working. If one has been sitting there unclicked, Hootus says so, and tells you to put it where people read rather than wait.
The run finishes
Posted, filled, run. From there he keeps the lineup, the reminders and the roles straight, and squawks when one of them breaks.
Six things worth knowing before you pick it.
Community mode is a kind of server, not a pile of switches. Some of it is simply absent, and finding that out on a Tuesday night would be worse than reading it now.
- Open to anyone is set on the raid, not on the server. Post one the normal way and it still asks for a verified member with a main character, exactly as a guild server does. Pass public when you create it, or turn it on afterwards with /raid edit.
- Signups from outside wait for the raid leader by default. That is a setting and you can turn it off, but leaving it on is the reason a stranger cannot silently take the last tank spot.
- There is no toggle for this in Settings. You answer it on the first screen of the setup wizard, or the person hosting this Hootus sends the question to your server and whoever has Manage Server presses a button. Those are the two ways in.
- Roster sync and the welcome gate are not switched off, they are not there. Deciding later that the server really is one guild is a change of kind, not a checkbox.
- Community mode does nothing about finding groups on other servers. Your raids live in your Discord and are seen by the people in it.
- A name you typed proves the character exists. It does not prove it is yours. Battle.net proves that, and Hootus records which of the two he got rather than calling both of them verified.
Run the raid for whoever turns up.
Add Hootus, answer the first screen with community, and post a raid open to anyone. Nobody has to join a guild, nobody has to verify, and the character clicking tank is one Blizzard has already confirmed can tank.