Realmlist: set realmlist lighthaven.quest
Website / register / docs: https://lighthaven.quest
Modules overview: https://lighthaven.quest/modules
Changelog (new entry every week): https://lighthaven.quest/changelog
Forum (new): https://lighthaven.quest/forum
Item / quest / spell database (self-hosted Aowow): https://aowow.lighthaven.quest
Source (everything is open): https://gitlab.tartampluch.com/martin

TL;DR. The realm has a forum now. It is my answer to the request I get more than any other – "please open a Discord" – and the honest one. On top of that, the last six weeks brought crowds in the taverns, a per-character honor rate, mirror images of your own character, a panel to command a squad of bots, a tank bot that can run an entire dungeon for you, PvP rank titles, a jeweler who rewrites the stats on gear you are already wearing, and a stack of crash fixes. As usual, most of it started as a ticket or a comment.

The forum, and why it is not a Discord

Nearly everyone who writes to me asks for a Discord, and it is a completely reasonable thing to ask for. Here is why it never happened: a Discord is a promise of presence. People join it expecting someone to be there – to answer at 2 a.m., to moderate, to keep it alive. I am one person with a job and a life, and a channel where questions sit unanswered for two days is worse than no channel at all. I would rather not make a promise I cannot keep.

A forum makes a different promise, and it is one I can keep. Threads stay readable months later instead of scrolling into oblivion. Search engines index them, so the next person with your problem finds your answer without asking again. Nobody expects a green dot next to my name.

How it works: reading is open to everyone, posting needs an account. You post under one of your characters – its name, its race portrait, its level, class and guild – and if you rename that character in game, the forum follows. Boards for General Discussion, Gameplay, Transmogrification, PvP, Lore, Support, Guides, Classes (one topic tag per class), Recruitment, plus one board per language the site speaks. Topic tags let you filter a board down to what you care about. Search covers titles and message text. The same automatic moderation as in-game chat applies, in both directions: a mute in game is a mute on the forum, and the other way around. No likes, no view counts, no private messages, no email notifications – and it keeps working, read-only, while the realm is down for maintenance.

New for players (opt-in, per character, as always)

• The inns are alive. Every tavern on the realm keeps a crowd of ordinary townsfolk – regulars settled at the tables, staff behind the bar – so cities stop feeling like museum dioramas.
• Honor rate. .rate honor 5 multiplies honor from kills, battleground objectives, end-of-match bonuses and quests. Setting it to 0 disables honor gain entirely if that is the run you want. It joins XP, loot, money, reputation, gathering and emblems in the per-character rate family.
• Mirror images. .mirror 4 summons four exact copies of your character, gear included, that follow you and fight the way you fight.
• Warden, an optional add-on panel. Commanding a squad of bots in one window: click a bot, click a talent spec to apply it, summon a whole raid, sort them by role. Install instructions are in the PlayerBots card on the Modules page.
• Hand a whole dungeon to your tank bot. Inside an instance, .dc on puts it in charge: it leads the party from boss to boss and pulls the trash on the way. It cooperates with the Dungeon Master NPC now instead of ignoring it.
• Dungeon Master: pick how many bosses a run contains. The options screen that already asks how the dungeon should be scaled now asks for the boss count too, and remembers your answer per character.
• Karl Fabergem, dwarf jeweler. Summon him from the Adventure Assistant and he rewrites the bonuses on the gear you are wearing.
• PvP rank titles are live, and they count everything you had already earned before the module was switched on.
• Extra talent points for your hunter pet: .extratalents pet 5.
• The flight master's whistle is opt-in, bought for 1 gold from the Adventure Assistant, instead of being pushed into your bags at login.
• Challenge Modes work again, and the Shrine of Challenge speaks your language rather than showing question marks.

If you missed the previous round: free class change (official race/class combinations only, no client edits), Crafting Artisans in Dalaran who craft any recipe of their profession from your materials, the Emblem Broker that upgrades old emblems one tier up the chain, an opt-in raid encounter skip for the gimmick fights that are miserable with bots, and per-character dungeon scaling profiles.

PlayerBots

• Around 2000 bots spread across every level bracket (1-9, 10-19, … 80), with realistic class and spec mixes. Your level 30 character finds level 30 bots to run dungeons with.
• Queues actually pop. Battlegrounds fill with bots at every level. The realm keeps permanent bot teams in rated 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5, rated roughly 1000-2000. 1v1 and solo 3v3 fill with bots as well – and when a queue genuinely cannot fill, the realm now says so in its log instead of leaving you guessing.
• Yogg-Saron and Icecrown Citadel are clearable with a bot raid. Encounters that assume a full human raid executing mechanics bots do not execute were retuned server-side. No client patch, nothing to install.
• You can clear your own bots' weekly raid lockouts (.playerbots bot refresh=raid *), your bots keep the quests you hand them, and LFG teleports them in.
• Bots hold real conversations, and answer whispers in your own language. The AI runs on the realm's own machine – nothing you type is sent to any outside service. The same model quietly watches the public channels for harassment and hate speech; ordinary swearing is fine.

Stability, so you do not have to notice it

• Several realm-wide crashes were traced to their source and fixed this summer: a group invite from the dungeon finder, a null dereference in spell handling, and two faults in the PlayerBots module that could take the world down outright.
• A watchdog restarts the realm within seconds if it stops answering, with a breaker so it cannot loop, and it now waits for several consecutive silent checks so a hiccup does not disconnect you.
• Shutdowns wait for every character to be saved. Nightly backups snapshot characters, guilds, arena teams, transmog appearances and pending emblem sends.
• Deploys go through a build to registry to release pipeline, so updates land in minutes and single containers can be updated on their own.

The philosophy has not moved

• Free, non-profit, educational. No subscription, no shop, no donations, no premium, no founder packs, nothing sold that touches the game. The box is paid out of pocket.
• Everything is opt-in, per character. Around seventy modules, all on by default and all doing nothing until you ask – the realm adapts to you rather than the other way around. Nothing requires a modified client: stock 3.3.5a, default install. The few add-ons that exist (an item-display fix, the Warden panel) are optional and clearly marked.
• Fully progressed from day one. Every raid, every battleground, every arena season.
• Your characters are yours. From your account page you can download any character, or all of them, as a standard AzerothCore dump – gear, guild ties, transmog appearances, reagent bank, per-character settings, friends list, arena teams, pending emblem sends. Reinsertable on any AzerothCore-compatible realm. If you ever want to run your own server, you take your character with you.
• Everything is open source, top to bottom: the orchestrator, the website, every module fork, the AI integrations. https://gitlab.tartampluch.com/martin – the build is one script.
• One operator. Moderation is automatic against published thresholds, mutes lift on their own, the conduct score regenerates, and I audit the verdict log to clear false positives. Support is best effort, and I say so plainly on the forum rather than pretending otherwise.

Most of what is above started as player feedback. If a default feels wrong, if a feature is missing, or if something is simply broken, say so – the realm moves on player input. You can reach me on the forum (there is a Support board), through an in-game ticket (Escape, Help, open a ticket – answered on your next login), or here in the comments and by DM.

See you in Azeroth.