Guild Phone

Guild Phone gives every character in your guild its own phone number.

Not a voice chat app — a telephone system of its own, reachable from your browser, a softphone, or a real desk phone on your desk. A chat server sits beside it, so the guild has one place to be instead of two.

This is not a telephone line

Guild Phone is a closed network for players. It is not connected to the public telephone network, and nothing about it is a substitute for a real phone.

• You cannot call emergency services. No 911, no 999, no 112, nothing. If you need help, use a real telephone.
• You cannot ring an ordinary phone number, and nobody can ring you from one. Calls only happen between people on Guild Phone.
• The numbers look like telephone numbers because that is the shape a human can read off a screen and type back. They work here and nowhere else.
• "Desk phone" means a SIP handset pointed at our server — not something plugged into a phone socket in the wall.
• There is no bill, no carrier and no phone company, because there is no telephone line.

Things Discord cannot do

• It rings. A raid starts and Guild Phone calls the roster, one player after another until the group is full — your desk phone, or the softphone on your mobile, whichever you are signed in on. Nobody has to be watching a channel.
• A number per character, and it is yours for good. Not per account, per character. It survives gquits, gkicks, transfers and the guild disbanding, because the number belongs to the character and the guild is just something we know about them. Nobody's contacts ever break.
• Your guild has a number any player can ring. Members who dial it land in the guild channel. Any other Guild Phone user reaches a reception: a greeting, the raids you have opened to visitors, and the option to leave a message for your officers. A recruit can find you without being handed an invite link by somebody they already know.
• Sign up for a raid by voice. Dial the raid line, hear what is scheduled, pick which of your characters is coming and what you can play. No website and no second screen — just the keypad, from whatever you are signed in on.
• Identity that is proven, not claimed. You get a character by logging into it in game and exporting. There is no "post your armory link" ritual, because the system already knows.
• Roles that cannot drift. Ranks, classes and guild membership come from the roster. Nobody maintains a list of fifty roles that is wrong the moment somebody is promoted.
• Class and spec rooms that look after themselves. A class with nobody in it has no room. Roll one and the room appears; it goes when the last player of that class leaves. Your spec rooms follow what you actually sign up as.
• Raids open to other guilds. Advertise a raid and players from any guild — or none at all — can find it, by telephone or in chat, soonest first, and turn up.

Things it also does, because you would miss them

• Text chat with history, so coming back after a day is not a wall of nothing.
• Who is online, and direct messages to anybody.
• Rooms with permissions: announcements only officers can post to, an officers room nobody else can see, general chat, and a public room for recruits.
• Officers create, rename, reorder and remove rooms, and set who may talk.
• Voice rooms for raids, with a number the moment the raid is scheduled — days ahead, so it can go in the calendar and come out of an officer's mouth.
• Voicemail, with the lamp on the handset.
• Paging, for officers who need a room to listen now.
• Raid scheduling, one-off or weekly, with sign-ups, roles, tank and healer caps and a bench.
• Everything in your timezone, including the times read out over the phone.
• Moderation: remove somebody from a raid, and a per-guild ban list that follows the player rather than the number, so an alt does not get round it.

What you get with a guild, and without one

Being in a guild is meant to be worth something, so some of this is on that side of the line. Nothing here is a restriction on who you may call or message — an unguilded player can ring anybody and anybody can ring them.

Without a guild

• A permanent number per character that rings
• Your name and number on the far end's screen
• Chat: who is online, and direct messages to anyone
• Find and join raids other guilds have opened to visitors
• Walk into any guild's public recruitment room and talk to them

With a guild, additionally

• Voicemail
• The raid line, and the guild's own number and voice channel
• Paging
• Your guild's chat rooms, including class and spec rooms
• Scheduled raids, sign-ups and the call tree that rings you when one starts

This addon is temporary, and that is the plan

Blizzard's API does not publish WoW: Forever characters yet. Until it does, there is no way for a website to know which characters are yours — so the addon exists to carry that out of the game for you.

When Forever appears in the API, joining will not need an addon at all: you sign in, name your guild, and we read the roster from Blizzard. This addon then becomes optional — useful for keeping a roster fresh and for the things only the game knows, like your rank names. We check twice a day for that change.

So install it to get started, not because you will be stuck with it.

Getting started

1. Install it and log in as the character you want a number for
2. Options → AddOns → GuildPhone → Export, then /reload
3. Upload GuildPhone.lua at guildphone.com

One officer doing that once gives the whole guild numbers. Each member still exports from their own character to claim it — that is how you show it is yours.

What the addon does not do

• It sends nothing anywhere. WoW addons have no network access at all. You move the file yourself, and it is plain text you can read first.
• It reads only the guild roster the game already shows you.
• It never asks for your Battle.net password. Signing in at the website is handled by Blizzard's own login.

Commands

• /gp — export, with a copy-paste box
• /gp status — whether your guild's roster is due a re-export
• /gp remind 14 — change the reminder interval, /gp remind off to stop
• /gpdiag — what this client exposes, for bug reports

Requirements

• WoW: Forever. It will not load on Classic Era, Anniversary or retail, and an export from those clients is refused.
• A free account at guildphone.com.
• For calls: nothing, if you use the browser. Otherwise any SIP phone signed in to Guild Phone — a free softphone on your computer or mobile, or a desk phone off eBay for the price of a month's game time. It connects over the internet to us; it does not plug into a phone socket.
• For chat: nothing, if you use the browser. Otherwise any XMPP client.

How it is built

Open standards, both of them older than WoW. Voice is ordinary telephony and chat is ordinary instant messaging, which means there is no proprietary protocol and no client you are obliged to install: use ours in a browser, or whichever app you already like, or a physical telephone on your desk. Nothing is reverse engineered and nothing can be shut off by a vendor.

One database is the single source of truth. Permissions are worked out from the roster at the moment they are asked rather than copied somewhere and left to go stale, which is why an officer's promotion or a gquit takes effect immediately and why nothing has to be kept in step by hand.

Calls are never recorded. Chat is kept only long enough to be useful when you come back.

Everything stays inside Guild Phone. There is no gateway to the public telephone network, by design and not by omission — adding one would mean carrier billing, number portability and emergency-call obligations, which is a different product with a different seriousness attached to it.

Status

Early, free, and actively developed by one person. It is a working system rather than a mockup, but it is new and the guild using it is small. Report anything broken at guildphone.com and it gets looked at.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment.