Hardcore GroupFound

A group-found ruleset for WoW Classic Hardcore. Trade and mail only with the specific characters in your group — added by unanimous consent, permanent once added — and the auction house is blocked outright.

Developed independently from (and probably simultaneously to) GroupFound by CobasTV. Slightly stricter mechanic using group list sharing between the group to enforce list recovery even if some group member deletes the addon, trades themself a bunch of gold then reinstalls it. Also only allows "from the start" group-found status if you started your character as self-found and switched on the Hardcore GroupFound addon before disabling self-found.

The rules it enforces

• Trade — the trade window is cancelled the moment it opens with anyone outside your group, with the trade button guarded as a second line of defence.
• Mail — blocked both ways: you cannot send to an outsider, and you cannot take items or money from their mail. GM and system mail always pass.
• Auction house — closed the instant it opens. There is deliberately no member exception: group members cannot route trades to each other through the AH either.

Membership is permanent and consensus-based

• Every existing member must approve a new member, then the candidate must accept. One decline cancels it. Approvals persist, so members don't all need to be online at once.
• Nobody can ever be removed. There is no remove or kick command anywhere. This is the deliberate difference from a whitelist you can edit: being able to remove names would create a false badge of achievement — trade with a crowd of players at higher levels, then delete them from the list and appear to have run with a small tight group all along. The list is a permanent record, not a convenience.
• The group remembers. Member lists sync between clients as a strictly additive union — so deleting the addon (or your SavedVariables) does not take you off anyone else's list, and the first sync from any groupmate puts you straight back under the rules.
• Joining requires the addon running on the candidate's client, so every check below applies from their first moment in the group.

Integrity: detecting play with the addon disabled

The addon aims to detect the obvious workaround — turning it off, trading, and turning it back on again.

• The addon snapshots your gold and an aggregated item fingerprint (equipped gear + bags + last-known bank, as an order-independent multiset) on every change and at logout. At the next login it compares. Nothing can legitimately change while you are offline, so any difference — even a five-second trade — is a violation, alerted on screen and broadcast to the group.
• Time alone breaks no rule. Untracked play time (/played growing more than the addon observed) is only logged and reported; the group's own stored fingerprints then judge whether anything changed. A crash is a non-event.
• Convictions are a forensic ledger — each one records the witness, the evidence pair, timestamps and versions, and syncs between members by ID. Convicted characters are rejected group-wide: no trade or mail with them, on both sides.
• Automatic verification, no human vote. Members whose own evidence covers the incident compare it and vote; an innocent majority clears that conviction everywhere. A chain rule stops a cheater laundering an old record behind a later crash.
• Pardons. Each release ships rules for conviction patterns it acknowledges as bug-caused; those clear on upgrade while every other conviction is held.

"From the start" status

The group shows the level it counts as group-found from — the highest level at which any member enabled it (weakest link). It reads "from the start" only when that is provable: level 1 and every member had Blizzard's Self-Found active when they joined. The recommended flow is to start Self-Found at level 1, turn on Hardcore GroupFound, and only then cancel Self-Found — the addon tells you the moment it is safe to do so. Inviting anyone who is not level-1 Self-Found warns you (and every voting member) that it lowers the whole group's status.

Also included

• Group merges — two existing groups can merge, with both sides voting.
• Solo escape hatch — started a group by accident? /hcgf leave works while you are still solo and Self-Found is still active (which proves nothing was traded). After anyone joins, membership is permanent.
• Minimap icon (LibDBIcon) whose tooltip lists exactly who your group-found is shared with, their join levels, and anyone currently rejected.
• Optional <Busy> tag (/hcgf tag on) — repurposes the built-in DND status so players without the addon see you are group-found and get your roster auto-replied if they whisper you.
• Built-in bug reporting — /hcgf report <name> assembles the full forensic record for a conviction; paste it into the linked form with your own account of what happened and it reaches the developers.

Commands

Requirements and scope

• WoW Classic Era (built and tested on 1.15.9). The Self-Found parts apply on Hardcore realms; on normal realms the group simply records its enable level.
• Every member needs the addon — it is what enforces the rules and carries the group list.
• Data is per character, since membership is a property of the character.
• Interface text is English only at present.
• Management is via slash commands and the minimap tooltip; there is no full graphical list panel.
• Enforcement works the way every self-found addon's does: a player can always edit files on their own machine. What this addon implements is that no supported action removes a member, and that the group's records aim to survive one member trying to erase them.
• MIT licensed. Embedded libraries (LibStub, CallbackHandler, LibDataBroker, LibDBIcon) keep their own licenses.