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GreenWall - Revived

Bridged Guild Chat for WoW Confederations

Description

GreenWall — Bridged Guild Chat for WoW Confederations

Stop juggling whispers and Discord channels just because Blizzard's 1,000-member guild cap forced your community into multiple guilds. GreenWall transparently bridges guild chat — and optionally officer chat — across every co-guild on a single realm or a connected-realm cluster, so a single conversation flows between all of them as if they were one guild.

The Problem

Blizzard caps guild membership at 1,000 characters. Active communities outgrow that fast, and the workaround — splitting into multiple guilds — fragments guild chat. Officers end up running parallel Discord channels, members lose track of who is in which sister guild, and join/leave events stop being visible across the whole community.

Existing bridge addons typically rely on a designated "gateway" member whose client relays the traffic. When that member logs out, the bridge dies. Configuration is done by every member individually, so newcomers can't see the bridged conversation until they set the addon up themselves.

The Solution

GreenWall uses a hidden custom chat channel as the transport. Every member of every co-guild joins the same channel automatically, and chat sent in any one co-guild's guild chat is replicated into the chat windows of every member of every other co-guild — routed through the channel, not through any one player.

There is no gateway member: with N online members the bridge has N independent senders. The bridge survives anyone logging out, and the only way to break it is for every member of every co-guild to be offline simultaneously.

Configuration lives in the in-game Guild Information page (J key). Officers set it up once for each co-guild; ordinary members install the addon and the bridge just works — zero per-member configuration required.

Core Features

Transparent Guild-Chat Bridging

  • Messages typed in /g in any co-guild appear in every other co-guild's guild-chat window in real time, attributed to the original sender
  • Optional co-guild tag prefix (e.g. <DMC>) so you can tell at a glance which sister guild a speaker is in
  • Bridged messages preserve player linking, item links, and chat-window class colors — they go through the standard CHAT_MSG_GUILD handler, not a fake channel
  • Hidden bridge channel never appears in your channel list and never spams the chat window

Officer-Chat Bridging

  • Optional second hidden channel for officer chat; configured via the GM's officer note (GW:a:channel:password)
  • Each officer opts in individually with /gw ochat on — non-officers never see officer traffic, and the addon detects officer-note read access before activating the bridge
  • Same replication semantics as guild chat: every co-guild's officer chat appears in every other co-guild's officer chat window

Roster Announcements

  • Cross-confederation join, leave, kick, online, and offline notifications — you see the same notifications you'd expect from your own guild for every member of every co-guild
  • Toggle with /gw roster on|off
  • A comember-cache hold-down suppresses the duplicate notification storm that would otherwise fire when a peer crosses the bridge channel boundary

Per-Character or Account-Wide Settings

  • mode setting picks between a shared GreenWallAccount store and per-character GreenWall settings — switch any character to whichever mode you prefer
  • Existing pre-1.9.0 installs default to character mode so nothing changes underneath you on upgrade
  • Settable via the standard Blizzard Interface Options canvas (ESC → Options → AddOns → GreenWall) or the slash-command CLI

Third-Party Addon API

Other addons can piggyback on the confederation bridge through GreenWallAPI:

  • GreenWallAPI.SendMessage(addon, message) — broadcast a message to every co-guild
  • GreenWallAPI.AddMessageHandler(handler, addon, priority) — register a callback for inbound messages
  • GreenWallAPI.GetChannelNumbers() — query the hidden channel numbers in use
  • Messages are framed with the source addon name so multiple subscribers coexist cleanly

An example consumer is GWSonar. Full reference in API.md.

Compatibility With Popular Chat Addons

  • ElvUI — bridged messages are routed through ElvUI's floating chat-frame event handler
  • Prat-3.0 — bridged messages flow through Prat's chat dispatcher
  • Identity-2 / Name2Chat / Incognito — outbound message rewriting is detected and accommodated rather than triggering the corruption guard
  • Compatibility shims activate automatically; no extra setup required

How It Works

Hidden Custom Chat Channel

GreenWall does not use the addon-message API. Bridged traffic is sent as ordinary chat-channel messages on a custom channel that every member silently joins via JoinTemporaryChannel. The channel is removed from every chat-window subscription after joining, so it never appears in your chat. Each segment is structured as:

opcode#guild_id##payload

The opcode (C chat, B broadcast, N notice, R request, M addon, E external API) tells the receiver which adaptation-layer decoder to apply. Maximum segment length is 255 bytes; longer messages are truncated.

Loopback & Corruption Detection

Every transmitted segment is hashed with CRC-16-CCITT and counted in a per-channel transmit table. When a peer's own broadcast loops back through the channel, the hash count is decremented. If a self-sent segment arrives with a hash that doesn't match anything in the table, the addon raises a corruption warning — that's how GreenWall detects a third-party addon mutating outbound chat (Identity-2, Name2Chat, Incognito are the known offenders, hence the dedicated compatibility shims).

In-Game Configuration

The addon reads its confederation configuration from the Guild Information panel (J) at login time and on GUILD_ROSTER_UPDATE. The directive grammar is line-oriented:

GW:c:channel_name:password           # required common channel
GW:p:Darkmoon Clan:DMC               # peer co-guild + tag
GW:p:Baseball Dandies:BBD
GW:p:Nightlife:NL
GW:v:1.11.0                          # optional minimum addon version
GW:s:value:k                         # substitution variable, $k expands later

The optional officer-chat directive lives in the GM's officer note: GW:a:officer_channel:password. Reload the configuration after editing with /gw reload. Full grammar in CONFIGURATION_FORMAT.md; officer-oriented setup walkthrough in GUILD_QUICKSTART.md.

Reconnection & Backoff

Channel joins are debounced by a configurable joindelay (default 30s) so the General channel grabs slot 1 first. Per-channel join failures use exponential backoff (10s → 900s). Configuration reloads are gated by a 5-minute hold-down to prevent reload storms on guild-roster churn.

Slash Commands

  • /gw, /greenwall — root command (use /gw help for the full list)
  • /gw status — channel and connection statistics
  • /gw dump — full settings and configuration dump (channel names and passwords redacted)
  • /gw reload — re-parse Guild Information after an officer edits it
  • /gw reset — disruptive: clear all channels and reload from scratch
  • /gw mode account|character — switch between shared account-wide settings and per-character settings
  • /gw tag on|off — toggle co-guild prefix tags on bridged messages
  • /gw roster on|off — toggle cross-confederation join/leave/online/offline announcements
  • /gw ochat on|off — enable officer-chat bridging (officers only)
  • /gw joindelay N — seconds to wait before joining the bridge channel
  • /gw debug 0..5, /gw verbose on|off, /gw log on|off, /gw logsize N — diagnostics
  • /gw redact on|off — obfuscate channel names and passwords in debug output (default on)
  • /gw version — print addon and WoW build versions

Requirements

  • WoW Classic Era client (Interface 11507 / 1.15.x). The Retail and other Classic-flavor branches of GreenWall are released separately.
  • Fewer than 10 active custom chat channels — you can verify in the Social window (O → Chat tab). The bridge channel needs a free slot.
  • For officer-chat bridging: officer-note read access on at least one character per co-guild. This conflicts with EPGP-style addons that store data in the officer note.
  • For initial configuration: Guild Information edit access in the guild management panel (J).

Recent Updates

v1.11.18 (2025-05-24) — TOC date fix.

v1.11.17 (2025-05-24)

  • Fixed Lua errors. Vielen dank, Jan Heise.
  • Updated TOC for WoW Classic 1.15.7.

v1.11.16 (2024-11-10)

  • Fixed interface options registration for the removal of InterfaceOptions_AddCategory.

v1.11.15 (2024-10-24)

  • Updated TOC for WoW Classic 1.15.4.

v1.11.14 (2024-08-13)

  • Replaced deprecated GetAddOnMetadata and IsAddOnLoaded with the C_AddOns-namespaced functions.

License & Source

GreenWall is released under the MIT License. Copyright (c) 2010-2020 Mark Rogaski.

Dedication

GreenWall is dedicated in memoriam to Roger Keith White (1962-2017), known to the members of Alea Iacta Est as Ralff. He was instrumental in the creation and refinement of GreenWall, and the soul of our community writ in flesh and blood.

Never again shall we meet such a formidable mountain of intelligence, curiosity, hospitality, and non-stop innuendo.