I'd like to introduce a new web-based tool I've been working on, which is targeted at helping guild leaders and officers recruit new players. Originally, it was just a script I wrote to help me save some time for my own recruitment process. I found myself spending too much time on the WoW guild-recruitment forum, sifting through post after post after post, trying to gauge the validity of any person at random. Unfortunately, I don't really have a lot of time to do this every day, and I wanted to find a way to streamline the process, with the eventual hope of automating it.

WoW Lemmings aims to achieve that automated, streamlined process.

URL: WoW Lemmings : Find new guild members. Now.

What it does: WoW Lemmings parses the WoW guild recruitment forum on a semi-regular basis, looking for new posts. When it finds new ones, it begins to collect up posts it thinks are people looking for new guilds (which I care about), while attempting to disregard posts that are general guild advertisements/spam (which I don't care about).

Once WoW Lemmings has collected up these posts of people looking for a new home, it begins to break down the post title and makes an attempt at categorizing the player, making the recruiter's job a lot easier. The three big questions I have with a potential candidate is:

1. Is it the class I'm looking for?
2. Is this player my faction? (Horde or Alliance)
3. Is this player currently on a server type that is allowed to transfer to my server type? (PvP or PvE)

So, for example, a post title that reads something like this:

[A-PvE] 70 Destro Lock LF SSC/TK Guild

will tell WoW Lemmings that it is an Alliance Warlock on a PvE server, categorizing it appropriately. There's no hard-and-fast rule on how people format their post titles, however, so I've tried to build a pretty flexible parser that allows for all kinds of nuances (it isn't infallible, though!); for example, I've noticed some people don't mention what server type they are on, but they put their server name in the title...so WoW Lemmings will do an internal lookup on that server, figure out its type, and categorize the player appropriately. Sometimes, players will post multiple classes in their title as well:

(H) Lock/Sham/Warr LF GOOD GUILD!!

WoW Lemmings will attempt to flag these multi-class posts as well.

Once all this data is collected, parsed, and categorized, it is presented on the WoW Lemmings homepage in a clean, fast-loading interface, with the newest posts (and their date/time) up at the top. Once you see the initial listing of people looking for a new home, you'll notice that you have search filters up at the top of the site. You can now begin to filter down the list of players based on what you are specifically looking for.

You will also notice an "Idiot Filter". Let's just say I am still amused at Rogues that spell their name ROUGE. The idiot filter is a funny flag I added which contains a list of common typos in WoW that might annoy you if you have less-than-average tolerance, so you are free to play with turning that on and off.

You will also notice that if you hover over a post-title, you'll get a little cartoon "balloon" with the first few sentences of the person's post. This will save you a little bit of extra time in actually having to click the post to see what kind of player you are dealing with. I've seen a few "Player LF Guild!" posts that end up being a complete lie/guild advertisement spam, so hopefully this will shave a few more minutes off your search.

The last feature of WoW Lemmings is the ability to keep this data coming to you on a regular basis, with little effort on your part. I do this via customizable RSS feeds. So, for example, if you are a guild leader/officer doing recruitment, and all you really care about are new Alliance Paladins on a PvE Server, you'll first search for that specific criteria (Choose "Alliance" as your faction, "PvE" as your server, and "Paladin" as your class), click the Scan button, take a glance at your new filtered results, and if you like what you see, click the "Subscribe to this Search Result" link in the left-nav, near the RSS Icon. Voila! You now have an custom RSS feed, and as new Alliance Paladins on PvE servers post that they are looking for a new guild, your RSS feed will send you the new info immediately.

In summary, WoW Lemmings is not a miracle "solve-all-your-recruitment-problems" tool, but hopefully it makes a worthwhile attempt at saving you time:

1. It only delivers people looking for a guild

2. It categorizes those people, which makes your search easier/faster

3. It gives you a glimpse of the player's post without having to dive into the actual forum

4. It allows you to customize your own search and automatically update you with new people, via RSS

Several of the EJ Forum regulars took time out of their schedules to help me beta-test this and assisted in shaping it with their own suggestions. I'd be happy to hear more suggestions, or problems you may have with it.

Is it possible to include a way of filtering between players looking for a guild and guilds looking for players? It may be a long shot but it would certainly be a nifty feature.

Seems like a useful tool in helping guilds find members. However, adding the ability to search for specific specs and level of raiding (IE, if you are looking for someone already attuned to Hyjal/BT) would help sift through the posts that aren't of any use. I don't know how difficult that'd be with the system you use.

Heya, Zif. Couple of challenges with that spec parse from the armory:

1. People don't always post a link to their character in the Armory. If they did, I certainly could snap it up, but I expect that it'd be the exception, rather than the rule.

2. Why not just snip the URL attached to the poster's avatar? Well, people have a tendency to post on alts if they want to be secretive. So, that's a wash.

Still, #1 is viable, when the link actually exists in their post.

And yes, /concur on the misspellings of Enhancement Shaman.

So you are relying on a particular formatting of the title of the post? So if someone just says "LF Guild" it gets skipped over?

[e] Looks decently useful though from a glance.

Filtering by spec and raid progression are the two most requested features I've received during development, so they're on the to-do list.

Actually, "LF Guild" matches the parsing engine, so that would be flagged as a good post, and not skipped over.

Flip the placement of "LF" and "Guild" around, like this: "Guild LF New Members!!", and now you have a guild advertisement, which is dumped. That single rule was the basis for the first version of the parsing engine. I've been expanding the rules since then.

Using your example, I have to make an allowance for this:

"LF Holy Priest for Guild"

The "LF" comes before the "Guild", but there is a class specification in between, and "for" precedes Guild...the parsing engine flags this as guild advertisement, and is discarded.

My gut says: if they can't put a coherent title on their post, you probably don't want them in your guild anyway.

But maybe I'm just a grammar nazi.

Great tool. I have a couple questions (1 not so serious, 1 more serious)

Is there a way to see only "idiot" posts?

Would it be possible to expand this to sites like mmo-champ, wor, etc which have recruitment forums?

And agreed that it would be nice to be able to filter by spec or progression level would be very nice, but it would probably be difficult to do accurately. The popup bubbles do a good job of this as it is. They're much faster than waiting for the official forms to load, just so you can read two lines of text.

Great job, I'll make sure and pass this along to our recruitment officer

One tiny wee point. Unless I'm reading it wrong, this thing doesn't parse the EU recruitment forums? Or, if it is there, the option certainly isn't placed anywhere obvious.

@Malan : It doesn't exclude posts that are vanilla; so long as the rules match what is being looked for, it collects all posts.

@Constantius : /concur, and it's designed to still provide you with that title, right at a glance, to cut away the shlock.

@Vyedma: No current way to only show idiots. Would be pretty easy to add if that's something that would interest a wide audience. Could I expand to other forums? Certainly. I expect the parsing rules would have to be adjusted, and the issue of cross-posting would be challenging to handle, unless these 3rd parties want to open up an API or, at the very least, some kind of standardized XML.

@DJNW: Correct, I'm only looking at the US-Forums atm. I'd very much like to add in the EU-Forums as well; of course, this creates a new issue: If the post title is in another language, I would have to develop a few EU contacts that would be willing to work with me as I write a new engine that uses the same rules, but now applies them to French, German, etc., for proper ranking and categorization.

Definitely something I'd be interested to do, if it's feasible.