Carl-bot moderates the server. Hootus runs the guild.
Carl-bot is a general moderation and community bot. HootusPlootus is a WoW Classic guild bot. The overlap is thinner than it looks, and the one place they really meet, self-assigned class roles, is the place worth talking about. Most guilds should run both.
Hootus is not a Carl-bot replacement, and this page is not pretending otherwise.
Carl-bot describes itself as a modular Discord bot for reaction roles, automod, logging, custom commands, autoroles, embeds, starboard, feeds, reminders and triggers. Read its docs and that is what you find: moderation, logging, tags, greetings, suggestions, starboard, roles. None of it is about World of Warcraft, because that was never the job.
Hootus does the other job. He checks the character on the Blizzard armory, validates a tank signup against the class doing the clicking, takes attendance off raid voice, and keeps loot honest. He has no automod, no starboard, no XP, no custom commands, and no plans for any of it. Two bots, two jobs, one member list.
A reaction role is a claim. A class role should be a receipt.
Plenty of WoW guilds use a general bot's reaction roles to let members pick their own class. It works, it is quick to set up, and it is the honest thing to compare against. The difference is not the button. It is what the button is standing on.
Kelthuz reacted with the Mage emoji
Kelthuz is now a Mage. He was a Mage in January. He rerolled Warlock in March and never touched the message again.
Kelthuz-Firemaw confirmed on the armory
Class read off the character, guild membership checked, role granted on the match. He rerolls, the role follows.
Reaction roles are a legitimate way to run this and a lot of guilds are fine with them. They just cannot tell you anything you did not already type in yourself.
- One of them can be wrong for a tierThe click is a one-time statement. Reroll to Warlock in March and the Mage role is still there in June, still colouring the name, still on the wrong side of your buff coverage.
- The other one moves when the character doesThe class role comes off the verified character, and the reconciler keeps it in step with what the armory says. Nobody has to remember to unclick anything.
Five things a general bot leaves to your other tabs.
All of it ships today. None of it is a roadmap item, and none of it is a thing Carl-bot was ever trying to do.
Unknown accounts get less, until they prove something.
Most guilds build this out of parts: an autorole for arrivals, a manual pass over channel permissions, and an officer who remembers to swap the role once somebody has been vouched for. It works right up until the officer is on holiday.
Hootus ships it as one flow, tied to the armory check rather than to a vouch. The wizard writes the permissions, the holding area is the default, and the promotion out of it happens because a character checked out, not because someone got round to it.
- The setup wizard writes the channel overwrites, so @everyone loses View Channel on the parts that matter
- An unverified arrival sees welcome and the sign-up channel, and stops there
- The Member role and the class role land together, on an armory match
- PUG access is scoped to one raid and revoked when that raid closes
- Access is a Discord role ID against a feature key. No rank ladder to keep in step
- The invite never asks for Administrator, and Hootus re-checks his own permissions every thirty minutes
Say the boring part out loud: this is structure, not safety. Hootus does not read messages, so he cannot catch a spam wave. That is what your moderation bot is for.
Same coloured name in the member list. One of them had to be earned.
Four jobs Hootus does not do at all.
Listed plainly, near the top of the page rather than buried under the buttons. If one of these is your actual problem, install Carl-bot and come back to this page afterwards.
- Moderation
Somebody has to watch the chat, and it is not Hootus
Hootus does not read messages for spam, does not filter words, and has no automod. Carl-bot documents an automod with punishments, whitelists and media-only channels. If your problem is a raid of fresh accounts posting links at 3am, that is Carl-bot territory and not a close call.
- Logging
You want an audit trail of everything
Carl-bot logs deleted messages, edits, joins, leaves, bans, timeouts, role changes and channel changes, split across whichever channels you point them at. Hootus records guild things: verifications, signups, attendance, roster movement. If you need to know who deleted what in #general, he is the wrong owl.
- Community
Your server is a community first, a guild second
Starboards, tags, custom commands, triggers, suggestions, reminders, embeds, feeds. Carl-bot ships that catalogue and Hootus ships none of it. A server where most of the activity is people talking gets more out of the general bot.
- Fit
You do not play WoW Classic, or not only WoW Classic
Hootus covers Classic Era, TBC Classic Anniversary and MoP Classic, and nothing else. Carl-bot works on any server, for any game, which is exactly the point of it. A multi-game community is a poor fit for a bot that only knows one.
Leave Carl-bot where it is. Add the WoW half.
Armory verification, class roles that follow the character, signup validation, attendance from raid voice, loot fairness and recruitment. Free at the core, five minutes to set up, and no reason to touch the bot already handling your moderation.