Are there any abilities or addons that would allow us to automate a member vote process? Specifically I'm looking for a tool that would automatically post a thread to our forums that includes a vote for a new guild member a set period of time after we click the "notify applicant accepted" button. Abilities to modify the content of this post would be fantastic.

You can make the application include an automatic vote, though there is not a way to make it in a two-step process where an application is first accepted and then voted on - generally speaking, shouldn't the voting happen before the app is accepted?

You CAN do some of this manually, though.

1) Set the application system to use an officer thread tag and allow voting.
2) An app gets submitted.
3) You accept or deny an app
4) Change the thread tag to something others can see (i.e. "Guild Only").

The only part about that is that the voting system for apps doesn't set an expiration date, and it's a few steps, but it's definitely doable.

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It's all in the reflexes.

My guild is casual. The way my guild handles applications is that we generally invite most people unless their apps are really bad or there's some other sort of red flag. The applicant is a recruit for 3 weeks after which we have a vote to determine if he becomes a full member or not. The problem is remembering to post the member vote for each recruit on time.

We do a lot of things with our applications so there are some features that would be really useful to us:

• Check box to make e-mail address optional. We have used "applications" as a method to collect other data from guild members (like signing up for real world guild social events) so we don't really need their e-mail address. Of course, those really aren't applications at all.
• Related to the above, it would be nice to flag an application as "Don't treat this like an application" which still allows us a custom form we can route to a particular forum thread tag, but doesn't show as a pending application.
• Check box to make e-mail not public. Personally, I don't want new applicant's emails visible to anyone who isn't me. I worry about personal data that isn't relevant to general guild members.
• An option to close/lock an application after a fixed time period. We have recently decided to have a fixed time length on our applications so they get resolved in a reasonable time period. Would be nice if they could flag themselves as CLOSED after a set length (per application).
• Automatic data gathering. Being a World of Warcraft guild there are lots of websites that relate to your character. It would be nice if I could either have the application look up the information for "Your Character's Name" or at least toss links that we can easily click. Right now I have a custom BBCode tag that generates those links, but we have to remember to toss it on someone's application to see. (I'd be happy to share said code if someone was interested). Also, if we are gathering character information, it would then be able to automatically fill in race, class and level. They'd just have to say name and server.
• Ability to configure the outgoing e-mail address. I have no idea what e-mail address applications are sent from, but since we have a domain that we own, it would be nice for them to be sent from recruiting[deleteme]@[deleteme]ourdomain.com so we could actually respond to e-mails related to the application.
• This is really, really fancy.. but I bet someone could use approval routing. In an application be able to list names that MUST vote on an application. Maybe tied with the OPEN/CLOSED tag in the subject?
• Opening cross referencing. With a particular application we can list what we are looking for. If the "Brief Statement" were more fixed in it's choices (or we had another method to easily indicate open, limited or closed) then when someone's data were imported, the app could say "Hey, you do realize we aren't looking for Warlocks, right?". Not to block someone out, but a pop up just to remind them a guild isn't looking for these things.
• With the changes in WoW role is sometimes more relevant than class. Maybe an option to list roles you want along with classes. Or maybe check boxes for classes to display at all. So I could check Hunter, Healer and Melee.

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Wow! Thanks for all the suggestions here. One of the things requested before and will definitely happen is to change the reply-to email address to something valid so that folks can at least reply to those emails.

Good ideas all around.

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It's all in the reflexes.