The Keep:Pirate Cove

Description
Doing things the pirate way... Enter if you dare!

Our guild wasn't created by us - it was boarded, taken over, robbed of its gems, and renamed by our pirate crew. You can still see the wreck of one of its old challenges inside. Yarrrrrrr!

It all started with being greedy, robbing pirates. By Davy Jones's wriggly beard, we never intended to be useful! We were (and are) just living the pirate life - we boarded not just this guild, but many others, robbed their gems, and then either sank them or held them for ransom (so people who wanted an own guild but didn't have the necessary gems could claim them) or made them part of our own fleet. Soon it turned out that by doing so, we were contributing to keeping the Habitican seas free from old abandoned guilds drifting there aimlessly and cluttering up the shipping lanes. The Habitican Admiralty noticed that, too, and started helping us - much like in the olden days with letters of marque and privateering. So nowadays we actually fulfill a function (removing inactive guilds that are no longer useful from the list of public guilds) - but we also still make a good profit from looting all those guild banks! And we don't forget to have lots of pirate fun and adventures, too. We've also fought the first Habitican guild-vs.-guild battle we know of, and might fight more in the future. And we're currently the only Habitican guild with more than four gems in our treasure chest!

Our captain is Mara the Marine Marauder.

By now we have a sister guild - the Elven Grove full of elves hunting old abandoned challenges. It has its own wikia guild page, too.

Challenges
Most of our challenges aren't inside our guild, except @Sphinx's Robin Hood challenge (running repeatedly, and won by @Dewines, @Riverstone, @Phantom818, and @Sphinx so far) and the old sunken football challenge. Most challenges are outside in the guilds we conquer or engage in battle with, or in the The Bulletin Board 📌 or (rarely) in the Tavern.

The challenges regarding the conquered guilds are mostly about distributing shares of the booty (guild banks gems) among our crew. Most of those are won by us pirates, but if a landlubber stumbles into a boarded guild with booty challenges, e can usually win one, too.

Sometimes we also create challenges about holding a guild for ransom (finding a new captain for the conquered guild - not necessarily a pirate). If you want to create a guild but don't have the gems for it, just ask in our guild chat if we have one we don't have a use for yet! Usually we'll just give it to you without challenge. But if two or more people want to become captain of the same guild, or if we're not convinced of your guild idea or captaining skills, we might set you some tasks first (things like finding a good new guild name, writing a new guild description, creating a guild challenge, etc., and just generally convincing us that you'll be a good guild leader).

When we battle another guild, there's usually one battle challenge in that guild (with two habits, one for the pirates, one for the other guild, but otherwise identical). When the fight is over, there are "badge" challenges for the winners and the other participants, so everyone who participated in the guild-vs.-guild battle can have them in their profiles. For more details, see the section about guild batttles.

Current Actions and Adventures
There is another guild named Hogwarts, and another one called Dumbledore's Army. All three have the same topic (general Harry Potter fandom). No attempts to merge the three have been made yet - but since all three are currently active with active guild leaders, it's probably not worth the effort right now.
 * Former captain @Jameson officially abandoned The Abandoned Camp (it had already been rather abandoned before that - just more unofficially -, and had had the same name) and named @Mara the Marine Marauder the new captain, and was even generous enough to deliberately leave his four gems in the guild. Four booty challenges were made and finally, after several months, all won - they asked participants to complete one of their own abandoned projects. But now there are more booty challenges to be won there because @Mara the Marine Marauder puts challenges distributing Pirate Cove guild gems into The Abandoned Camp. (That way, we can both keep our amazingly full Pirate Cove treasure chest to brag with it, and share the gems among the pirates. That wouldn't technically be possible in the Cove itself because, if a guild owner creates a guild challenge with a gem prize, the prize is always taken from the guild bank - there is no option to pay the prize from one's personal gems.) There are some vague plans as to what will become of the guild. There's a guild chat discussion going on about adding a pirate island (with a cove, a camp, a duelling ground, and a volcano) to the official map of Habitica, along with other places inviting more roleplay and being represented by guilds, and maybe a tour that involves visiting them and performing tasks there - but no one found the time to do something about them yet. Former captain @Jameson expressed hopes of hearing wild stories and rumors about that camp in the future - let's not disappoint him!
 * @Riverstone boarded the long-dead "Lolz" guild and turned it into Pirate Foley - a guild dedicated to making a piratic soundscape Habitica audio theme, with amazing results so far! Contributors welcome!
 * @Dewines had had the Order of Con Congeries in her sights for months. The topic (organizing Habitica meetups at SF/Fantasy/other conventions) sounded too interesting and important to just let the guild fade into oblivion. When @Dewines offered to revamp and promote the guild a little, old guild leader @Helmsman Of-Inepu responded at first, but then became inactive again. So, in the end, @Dewines was made the new guild leader. She renamed the guild Convention meet-ups, panels and other activities, gave it a beautiful new logo, and is generally trying to revive and promote it. @Dewines doesn't want to stay its long-term guild leader, though, and is looking for an interested and capable volunteer to take that position. This could become an important guild for the future representation of Habitica at cons! On the other hand, if it just won't stir, and no new guild leader can be found, it could also just get deleted. So the fate of this guild is still open.
 * @Luthien targeted the prayer-themed and very dead Divine Office/Liturgy of the Hours guild, became the new captain there, renamed it Formerly Divine Office/Liturgy of the Hours, and set up some booty challenges with common household chore tasks. Praying, cursing, swearing, or meditating while doing them is entirely optional - as long as you keep your home religiously clean! One of the challenges is still up for grabs. There are no further plans for the guild yet, so deletion is likely.
 * The Baron's Civility Parlor: Surprisingly empty in both description and communication, this guild's purpose is a mystery... In fact, it escaped the pirates' notice for a time, that is, until @Ariel sighted it. @Alys was about to light the cannons of destruction, but decided there may be treasure aboard... and there was. @Ariel claimed captaincy and created challenges for pirates to establish their own coats of arms. Some can still be won!
 * While in the process of adopting the abandoned challenges there, pirate @keyes also stepped up to become the new headmaster of the rather active Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (The last headmaster had magically vanished more than a year before.) Being both a Harry Potter fan and a pirate, @keyes is planning to keep this position and keep the school running. It is unclear if and when the school's gems will be used for challenges, and if those can be called booty challenges or just plain guild challenges (or both).
 * Dr. Phil's Redhawks - Talk about an abandoned ship! This guild had virtually no description, no guild chat, and an inactive guild owner. @Phantom818 boarded the guild and created challenges to distribute the three gems. Since there's no idea what the original guild owner had in mind, two of the four challenge tasks relate to Dr. Phil, while the other two are general reading/learning tasks. Some challenges can still be won!
 * Sailing through the exotic waters of the Japanese Sea, @tenko stumbled upon the remains of the ancient floating shelter 凡才の挑戦. It was empty and apparently long abandoned in favor of the new and more sturdy shelter, 日本語話者の集会所ｶｯｺｶﾘ. @tenko successfully claimed captaincy, translated its name to Mediocrity Challenge, and plundered its valuables (with a four-gem challenge for herself). Then @tenko gave the ship to @Nae who had visited the Pirate Cove with a good idea for a new guild. @Nae hasn't gotten around to renaming and repurposing the guild yet, but probably will soon.
 * @Ariel boarded and became captain of The Future Procrastinators Of Tomorrow (where the crew had apparently postponed chat for too long), and is currently evacuating those crew members who are still alive to the Procrastinators guild. The existing challenge will hopefully be taken care of by the Elves, and booty challenges will likely go up in mid-February.
 * Hula Hoopers was an ancient looking caravel sighted by @Ariel. When she asked the pirates about it, it turned out that the ship's crew was inactive even in the days of yore, and @Dewines was a member of that crew, then under the alias @Castanwydden. There were no other volunteers to steer that ship, so @Ariel became its new captain and set up hula-hooping booty challenges - and before she knew it, veteran hula-hooper @Dewines was surrounded by other pirates asking for advice how to hula-hoop with the life rings.
 * In another part of the Habitican seas, @cTheDragons and @Phantom818 sighted an eccentric galley WizardChan carrying suspicious, possibly magical cargo. They hailed it at the top of their lungs, but there was only the wind there, the ship was abandoned by its crew. @cTheDragons led the takeover, renamed the galley The Guild formerly known as WizardChan, and is currently investigating the curiously shimmering things lying in stock. Interesting booty challenges are already up (prompting the boarding pirates to say "Arrrbrrracadarrrbrrra!" a lot), after which the ship will become a great shooting target for the pirate cannons!
 * The fully computerized ship CakePHP (referring to the open-source web framework CakePHP) ran on autopilot for many years - so much so that no one even noticed that captain and crew had left the ship. They had been gone for more than a year when @Snellopy sighted and @Ariel hailed it. So @Ariel boarded it, managed to log into the ship's computer as its new captain, reprogrammed the ship to show Pirate CakePHP as its new name, and promised booty to those pirates who woud contribute to its code - or that of any other open-source project. Challenges can still be won!
 * The Trust Fortress was sighted, hailed, and boarded fast by @Ariel, who renamed it Pirate Trust Fortress and encouraged her trusty fellow pirates to build, well, trust (for gems!) - whereas its former crew had mostly talked about caffeine. (We don't know why - by the time the pirates boarded, the former captain and crew were long gone.) Booty challenges can be won now!

Guilds in Our Sights
This is a list of guilds we're currently watching because at first sight they either appear to be inactive, are duplicates of other guilds on the same topic, or we might try to capture or sink them soon for another reason. (It doesn't necessarily mean that the guilds are really inactive or otherwise useless and that we'll really target them, only that we're observing them.) With the help of this list, suggestions made in Pirate Cove guild chat will hopefully not get lost. The list is in alphabetical order.

If a guild gets mentioned often but turns out to be worth saving (or if the guild leader says e'd like to keep it) it will also show on this list - so, if another pirate finds it, e can look it up here and find out that it's been discussed before, with the conclusion to keep it.

For some subjects there are several guilds, and this list helps to get an overview on which ones exist before deciding which ones to delete or privatize. That's what the section Guilds with Similar Topics at the bottom is for.


 * Aperture Science Adventure Enrichment Guild: Entertaining, but currently populated by guild creator + pirates (one of which does have a genuine interest in it though).
 * Asynchronous: One of the several sleep guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). A guild for people with irregular sleep schedules. Last chat November 2015 (the post before is from August 2015), several pages of chat, active guild leader (last login January 2nd, 2016 as of January 27th, 2016)) @Veovis Muad'dib, one active challenge (owner is the guild leader), 3 gems. The plan is to merge this guild with the more active and more general Naps of Power: Habiticans for Better Sleep guild and privatize or plunder and delete the original guild. Hailed by @Phantom818 via PM to guild leader @Veovis Muad'dib, still awaiting reply. On January 27, 2016, @Mara the Marine Marauder also suggested and described merger there in chat.
 * Australians on HabitRPG: Sighted by @Snellopy. Duplicates the more active The Land Downunder. Last chat February 2015, active guild leader @johnball (last login January 7th, 2016), no challenges, 4 gems. Hailed in guild chat by @Dewines in early December 2015, no response as of January 2016.
 * Bad Habits: Sighted by @cTheDragons. Based on Show Linux Outlaws. (Finished producing in 2014). Last chat August 2016. But the real back forth chat stopped in 2014. No Challenges. 4 Gems. Captain inactive since 2014. Hailed and PM the Captain by @cTheDragons on 24 January 2016.
 * Bitcoin / Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts: Sighted by @Blue. Last chat January 2016 (2 previous posts are from September and April 2015; there are several pages of chat), inactive guild leader (last login October 28th, 2014), 3 challenges (one with an active owner), 4 gems. Not contacted yet. Are the challenges interesting/helpful? Is there interesting stuff in the chat? Should it all be moved into one of the other money-themed guilds? With that much chat and challenges, maybe someone even wants to keep and lead the guild?
 * BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution: Sighted by @Blue. Last chat February 2015, 9 one-line chat posts, active guild leader (last login January 10th, 2016), no challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * Chores (5 icons): Sighted by @Snellopy. Guild leader is @Soloana. Last chat November 2014 (prior to pirates chats). Three simple one-task challenges (dishes, laundry, trash) which contain little icons: dishes, laundry, trash created by @Soloana instead of emoticons. If @Soloana agrees to it (or if she doesn't answer and copyright allows it?), we could put the icons in the 📜 Library of Shared Lists or a similar place. @Alys said "Because Soloana is still an active Habitican, I won't change the owner unless Soloana asks me to." @Alys offered help to @Soloana with making the guild more active, see the guild chat for this.
 * Copaxone club: Last post November 2015, 5 one-line chats in 10 months, 1 challenge without any tasks and the guild creator as its only participant, 4 gems. Owner is active (last login January 9th, 2016) but hasn't responded to private messages.
 * Culture Me!: This guild looks active as of January 2016 so it is not a current target. (It got put on the list because it was rather inactive before, but chat revived in November 2015 after @Riverstone poked it a little. If it stays that active for one or two more months, we'll take it off this list.)
 * Cute and Cool Things on Tumblr: Sighted by @Blue. One of the several tumblr related guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Similar to Tumblr Crowd. Last chat January 2015, about two pages of chat, active leader (last login January 9th, 2016), no challenges, 4 gems. Hailed by @Blue in chat on 12 December 2015 (no reaction as of January 10th 2016). Guild leader not messaged yet. Guild looks like a candidate for privatzing or deletion.
 * Dr. Phill's AoP: Sighted by @cTheDragons. Chatless Guild. No Challenges. 4 Gems. Captain active, but first member hasn't logged in since 2014. Hailed and PM the Captain by @cTheDragons on 26 January 2016.
 * Dumbledore's Army: This guild isn't currently a target. In the long run, though, the three guilds Hogwarts, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Dumbledore's Army might want to merge (see Guilds with Similar Topics), but at the moment all three are active and have active guild leaders, so it's probably not worth the effort yet.
 * Early to Bed and Early to Rise: One of the several sleep guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Halfway active, is only on the list because it has a sleep subtopic and could therefore possibly be merged into the "main sleeping guild" Naps of Power: Habiticans for Better Sleep. Hard to find because neither name nor description contain the word "sleep" (and owner @aaronux last logged in 04 November 2015, so currently only admins can change that). Last chat 10 January 2016 (as of 27 January 2016), chat looks full, 4 challenges, 4 gems. Not hailed yet. (But @Mara the Marine Marauder asked a sleep-related question in chat to see how fast they react.) Judging from text search, no other sleep guilds were ever mentioned in chat there. Suggested action: Congratulate them on being an active guild, but tell them about sister guild and describe merging options anyway, emphasizing that if they prefer to stay as they are, that's perfectly fine. Also mention that they are hard to find (and why), and would they like an admin to add the search term "sleep" to their description?
 * E-Commerce: Sighted by @Blue. Last log July 2015, 8 posts with several links and infos - are any of those worth saving/posting elsewhere? Inactive owner (last login February 24th, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * Edu-Geek: Sighted by @tenko. A guild made for IT educators. Last log August 6th, 2015, captain last sighted on January 12th, 2016, 1 dead challenge, 4 gems in the coffer. Hailed by @tenko in the guild chat on January 10th, 2016
 * Fit Anime Clan: Small guild (5 genuine members) that more or less duplicates The Otaku Dōjō and the Anime Club- but the guild members said they want to stay separate, so it's currently no longer a target. Both chat and guild leader are active, no challenges, 4 gems. Hailed by @Mara the Marine Marauder in chat.
 * Five for Fighting: A relatively new guild for hockey fans still gathering up members, last post January 4th, 2016.
 * FR: Arcane Members: Targeted by @MEmry. Last chat October 14th, 2015, only 7 posts in chat, active guild leader (last login January 7th, 2016), no other active genuine member, no challenges, 4 gems. Several pirates posted in chat over 2 months period - no reaction. @MEmry messaged the guild leader on November 29th, 2015, guild leader answered that e is no longer interested in maintaining the guild. Guild leader will hopefully transfer leadership to @MEmry soon. Meanwhile, pirates have invaded the chat.
 * Gamification: Sighted by @Snellopy. Last chat January 6th, 2016, inactive guild leader (last login October 27th, 2015) no challenges, 3 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * Habit Engine: Not a target - or rather, target reserved for @Alys. @Alys said about it: "Habit Engine owned by Fragmental Stew - leave this one alone. It's for a third-party tool that uses Habitica's API and I've spoken with the guild owner (the tool's creator) a little in the past. I'll talk to them about moving the information to a wiki page and then deleting or privatising the guild." Active guild leader, last chat July 2015, lots of earlier chat, no challenges, 4 gems. Sighted by @tenko.
 * Happiness Projectors: Guild about finding happiness via Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project method. Last chat October 2015 (the one before is from April), lots of chat, guild leader last logged in 12 November 2014, no challenges, 4 gems. Sighted by @tenko. Not hailed in chat yet. Probably still has active members. Looks like a candidate for leader change (if the members wish to revive it) or deletion/merging. Though merging into what isn't quite clear: We could recommend happiness-oriented guilds (Happy List Guild!, Good Things Today, possibly Achieve, Accomplish, Aspire, etc.) as well as long-term project guilds (Long-Term Goal Accountability 🎯, etc.), though none seem a very good fit. Suggestions about where best to send members to are welcome - or we can just tell them to go search the guilds list themselves. Not discussed in detail in Pirate Cove yet.
 * Hogwarts: This guild isn't currently a target. In the long run, though, the three guilds Hogwarts, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Dumbledore's Army might want to merge (see Guilds with Similar Topics), but at the moment all three are active and have active guild leaders, so it's probably not worth the effort yet.
 * Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: This guild isn't currently a target (and is already in the hands of a pirate anyway - Headmaster @keyes is both a Harry Potter fan and a pirate). In the long run, though, the three guilds Hogwarts, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Dumbledore's Army might want to merge (see Guilds with Similar Topics), but at the moment all three are active and have active guild leaders, so it's probably not worth the effort yet.
 * If Not Now, When?: Sighted by @Blue. Last chat December 2014, two posts total in the chat, active guild leader (last login January 9th, 2016), 1 nice challenge (by guild leader, with gem) with list of common dailies (various household chores, exercise, mail/email/bills, ...) that might fit into the 📜 Library of Shared Lists or The Basics guild (though maybe they'd be overwhelmed with it), 3 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * ImgurFIT Guild: Sighted by @Blue. Last chat May 2015, inactive guild leader (last login March 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * Irish Players: Sighted by @Ariel. This sighting resulted in a long discussion about demographics guilds and new guidelines for these guilds. This is the only guild for the country of Ireland so discussion about targeting this guild should not be re-opened unless it becomes extremely dead.
 * Karma Vacation - Sighted by @Dewines. Apparently a duplicate of the similarly inactive Plurk Peeps guild also relating to Plurk (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Last post March 2015, 7 short posts totalling 34 words exchanged within the last 2 years, fairly active guild leader (last login December 31st, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Not hailed yet. Looks like a good candidate for plundering and deleting.
 * Kemetic Temple: A religious guild. Per @Alys, this guild should not be targeted.
 * Korea Lucid Dreaming: Basically the guild leader talking to emself (or not at all) in Korean. Except for the language, it is a duplicate of Oneironauts. Active guild leader, one other genuine member who is inactive, last genuine chat 4 November 2015, 4 chat posts, no challenges, 4 gems. Sighted and hailed in chat by @tenko.Google translation of description: "Korea Lucid Dreaming (lucid) is a Korean Lucid Dream Guild. If you are interested in Lucid Dream! everyone! Welcome ~ Come Join Please see grow your skills." and of chat: @inactive guild member: "Hello!" - @guild leader: "Guild doeyo challenges are also free to make everyone ~" - @tenko: "How about this guild? Need anyone? The heavy Mathematica because Koreans hat, face, create a guild, we probably look more titles Is there really needed minutes. Yeah.I'm, Mr. Gray @ shining, why do I write again ^^ Nice to meet Harvey Romantica? I hear your mind?" - @guild leader: "The guild's just a cafe created as a hobby. Yet no detailed plan." As long as the guild leader is active and wants to keep the guild, we can only wait a few months and watch this one die a slow and agonizing death. In the end it will be dealt with by @tenko or anyone else who speaks Korean and might possibly convince the guild leader to give up the guild. @tenko wrote in Pirate Cove: "[...] could tell him that it's a duplicate of the oneironauts (lucid dreaming guild) or that he's alone in this guild because there are like 5 koreans on all habitica, but he seems to be satisfied with himself so far so i don't think these arguments would have worked with that guy. [...]" Not sure if this means @tenko also talked to the guild owner by message.
 * Liquid Courage : The guild isn't quite a duplicate of Alcoholics Anonymous - Lets Stop Together! because it's for everyone who wants to drink less, not limited to alcoholics. Chat revived a little bit lately, last genuine post 16 January 2016 as of 27 January 2016, about 20 chat posts. No challenge, 4 gems.@Lord Vlad volunteered to become guild leader (but wasn't highly interested) prior to the December 20th, 2015 update by @Alys: "The owner of this guild, Christopher Keele, last logged in on 06/19/2015, which is only a few months ago. Because of that, I'm not changing the guild leader yet. Lemoness has said that she'd prefer we'd wait until a year has passed. Since it sounds like this guild will continue on in mostly its current form, the leader will stay the same, at least for now". Currently not a target. (To be looked at it again in June.)
 * Lockpicking: Currently not a target. Sighted by @MCRadium. Last chat February 2015 (some interesting chat before, contains links where to buy lockpicks), inactive guild leader (last login July 7th, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Guild leader was messaged by @MCRadium but didn't answer. Admiral @Alys inspected it and commented: "I'm tempted to just leave it as it is for now. It is inactive (with the leader's been gone only six months), however for some people it will be an interesting topic and there's no other similar guilds that I know of, so maybe it's worth having it hanging around in case it picks up in future. Anyone stumbling across it will instantly know what it's about so they can ignore it easily. If we do something in future to semi-hide less active guilds, then guilds like this one will be less of a problem."
 * Literature Students of HabitRPG: Sighted by @Ariel. Owner last logged in 1/21/2015. Last chat December 9, 2014 as of 1/26/16. No challenges. Four gems. No contact yet.
 * Moonies: Sighted by @tenko. A guild devoted to the legendary warrior for love and justice, Sailor Moon. Last log made on January 13th, 2015, the captain went missing on June 28th, 2015, 4 crystals still remain in the coffer, and there are no demons left to conquer (no challenges). Hailed by @tenko in chat and via PM on January 12th, 2016, awaiting reply.
 * One Blood Guild!: Great topic, but has de facto been swallowed up by the Ghost Ship guild. Last post February 2015, previous post May 2014, altogether 12 posts in 2 years excluding pirate @Mara, the Marine Marauder's post, no challenges, 3 guild gems, semi-inactive guild leader (last login December 18, 2015).
 * One Game a month: Sighted by @Ariel. Owner last logged in 8/20/2014. Last chat 10/27/2014 as of 1/25/2016. No challenges. Four gems. No contact yet.
 * Outdoor Corps: Sighted by @Phantom818. Currently not a target because last chat wasn't that long ago, the guild leader has become active again (after not logging in for several months), and its emphasis is much more on outdoor sports than Venture outside your lair 🌿, so it's not really a duplicate guild. Last chat November 2015, several pages of chat, active guild leader (last login January 10th, 2016), 2 challenges, 4 gems.
 * P90 Workouts: Last chat January 6th, 2016, inactive leader (last login July 30, 2014), no challenges, 4 gems. No contact yet.
 * Paleo Diet: Last chat September 2015, inactive leader (last login August 3rd, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Hailed by @Ariel in guild chat on December 19th, 2015, no reply as of January 25th, 2016.
 * Parkour Practitioners!: Was suggested in guild chat, but doesn't look that inactive.
 * Perfect Day Last two chat posts October 31 and November 02, 2015, previous chat January 2015, active leader (last login January 10th, 2015), no challenges, 2 gems. No contact yet.
 * Plurk Peeps - Sighted by @Dewines, apparently a duplicate of the similarly inactive Karma Vacation (see Guilds with Similar Topics), contains a link to an inactive Plurk page. Last post March 2014, 7 short posts, recently active guild leader (last login December 28th, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Not hailed yet. Looks like a good candidate for plundering and deleting.
 * Resilience: Last genuine chat August 2015, two genuine posts, active guild leader (last login January 2nd, 2016) didn't react in chat, no challenges, 4 gems. First hailed in chat August 2015, guild leader @aloki not messaged yet. Duplicate of/related to Sustainable Living, The Urban Homesteader's Guild, inHabitants of Earth: the eco-friendly guild, Conscientious Consumption, and The Gardening Gnomes.
 * /r/ADHD: Topic refers to /r/ADHD subreddit. Sighted by @cTheDragons on 31 January 2016.Last chat over July 2015. Captain asleep at the wheel since June 2015. No challenges. 4 Gems. Unofficially hailed.
 * /r/GetMotivated: Topic refers to /r/GetMotivated subreddit. Sighted by @cTheDragons on 20 January 2016. A chatless guild with many members active, however one last logged in 15 July 2015, so it's at least that old. Guild leader @Curlaub is still active (last logged in 21 January 2016 as of 25 January 2016). 4 gems, no challenges. @cTheDragons hailed the guild in chat and by PM on 24 January 2016. No answers yet.
 * /r/Team_Japaneseのギルド: Sighted by @keyes. One of the several Japanese learning guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). The guild's name is is referring to this Japanese language learning Reddit website. Last chat that didn't just say "Hi!" in Japanese was in December 2014, inactive guild leader (last login November 10th, 2014), no challenges, 4 gems. No contact yet.
 * SHOUTYWAFFLES came to @Dewines's attention due to it having a plague victim aboard (i.e. there was an inappropriate word in the guild description). It's an odd little guild which seems to get about one post per month. The leader is inactive (last logged in 30/07/2015), there are no challenges and it still has 4 gems. @Dewines has hailed the guild (by SHOUTING at them). The outbreak of plague was promptly dealt with by @Alys and the guild is now safe to approach. However, it has a quirky charm and is unlike any other guild, so probably should be left to go its own way now there is no danger of infection.
 * /SIG/: Interesting links, some challenges - someone put a lot of work into this. But is anyone still using it? Last post October 2015, inactive guild leader (last login May 12th, 2015), 3 active challenges, 1 gem. No contact yet.
 * Skydiving / Parachuting: Sighted by @cTheDragons. Last post May 2014, active Captain leader (last login 26th January, 2016), no challenges, 4 gems. Unofficial hail in chat by @cTheDragons. Signal the Captain on 31 Jan 2016.
 * Social Justice Guild: Is there any other guild covering this topic properly? If not, this guild might be worth reviving (there is Effective Altruists, though - should it be merged in there?). People keep joining and asking if it's alive, 6 chat posts ranging from October 2014 to 24 November 2015, guild leader last logged in on May 3rd, 2015, 2 challenges are being taken care of by the Elves, 4 gems left in the coffer. Group leader @Nufah messaged by pirate @tenko on January 10th, 2016, asking @Nufah about her intentions as per the guild.
 * Stack Exchange Addicts: Sighted by @Blue. Last post December 2014, active guild leader (last login January 2nd, 2016), 1 abandoned challenge (might be worth moving to one of the coder guilds), 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * Stormageddon et al. Farily inactive guild with no guild description. Very small, just 5 members, last post July 2015, active guild leader (last login January 1st, 2016), no challenges, no guild gems. Not contacted yet (as pirates).
 * Team UfYH: Sighted by @Snellopy. The guild refers to the popular (Warning: Linked site contains swearwords!) UfYH website which is dedicated to providing motivation and checklists for doing household chores and making one's home less messy, and is apparently rather good at it. Though this guild is not very active (last post May 2015), it has 10 challenges, most of which people are still using. Another good reason for keeping it is that it's (mostly!) good at editing out the swearwords contained in the original UfYH website, also the guild leader is still logging into Habitica (last login January 9th, 2016). Therefore, the consensus seems to be that it should remain unboarded. If it were removed, and a new one created later, it might not be so good at avoiding swearwords, and would create additional work for the Habitica moderators. (Admiral @Alys has already looked into it and made the point about preserving it because of their care to avoid bad language.)
 * The Cozy Inn of the Drowsy Dragon -- Idiopathic Hypersomnia: No longer a target. Sighted by @tenko. One of the sleep related guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). A snuggly looking dragon adorned ship giving refuge to a handful of hypersomniacs. The ship's strongbox was found to contain 3 gems and no challenges. The captain, @Somnabat, was present on the deck as of January 29th, 2016. He and his crew members greeted the pirates in an amicable way, and when questioned about the low activity in the logbook (last entry written in September 2015), they shared plans for creating more entries, challenges and attracting new crew members in the near future, and made it clear that they don't want to merge with a general sleeping guild either. Pirates sailed away in peace wishing them best of luck in their endeavors.
 * The LearnJapanese Guild : Sighted by @tenko. One of the several Japanese learning guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Last log November 24th, 2015, crew members seem to have stopped making entries in the logbook around October 2015. Captain last sighted on June 4th, 2015, no challenges spotted and 4 gems are still left in the chest. Hailed by @tenko in chat and via PM on January 10th, 2016, awaiting reply.
 * The Saiyans: Sighted by @tenko. Last logbook entry written on November 18th, 2015, captain last sighted on September 25th, 2015. There are 4 gems left in the coffer to be salvaged, and 1 challenge which the Elves are taking care of. Hailed by @tenko in chat and via PM on January 10th and 12th, 2016 respectively. Awaiting reply.
 * The 0/0 Club: This guild lost its purpose when the level cap was removed. Last post December 2015, inactive guild leader (last login August 23rd, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * The Archons: One of the several roleplaying guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Has beautiful challenges, lots of creative chat, but is currently sadly inactive. Guild leader @rocabella77 last logged in August 2015. Elves and pirates are still working on what to do with the challenges and the guild.
 * The Chess Club: Was inactive for a while, but revived, so it's currently not a target. Hailed in chat by pirate @Blue on November 29th, 2015. Last chat January 8th, 2016, guild leader last login January 8th, 2016, no challenges, 4 gems.
 * The LearnJapanese Guild: Sighted by @keyes. One of the several Japanese learning guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Last meaningful chat post November 24th, 2015, inactive guild leader (last login June 4th, 2015), there are no challenges and 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * The Omniscients: A nice thought, but already covered by the Today I Learned guild. Last post December 2015, inactive guild leader (last login July 12th, 2015), no challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * The Roman Soldiers: Spotted by @Dewines. No chat, active guild leader (last login January 10th, 2016), the only other genuine guild member is inactive, no challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet.
 * Tired Pessimists: Sighted by @Phantom818. Last chat September 2014, several pages of chat, active guild leader (last login January 10th, 2016), 1 challenge, 4 gems. Not hailed yet. Challenge is abandoned and very simple, but could be a nice time management challenge worth saving, maybe for the 📜 Library of Shared Lists or similar. Chat mentions some potentially helpful things: The website 7cups.com (about which there's already a Tavern challenge Become involved with 7 Cups of Tea!) and the books "Get It Done When You're Depressed" by Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston and "Mood Mapping" by Liz Miller. When hailing, we should probably suggest similar guilds. Searches for "mood", "depress", "anxiety", "chronic" bring up relevant ones. (They don't talk about tiredness/sleep in chat.) There isn't really a duplicate guild though.
 * Triathletes: This guild is no longer a target. For a long time, it had no chat messages and few members - but after being hailed by @Blue on New Year's Day 2016, Captain @Haukur bravely fought back, singlehandedly threw all pirates overboard, and saved and revived the guild. Apparently all that training had paid off!
 * the social boldness challenge: No challenges despite those being the guild purpose, empty chat, inactive guild leader (last login November 18th, 2015), 4 gems. Hailed by @Blue on January 1st, 2016.
 * The Society of Flash and Guile: One of the several roleplaying guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). Last chat December 2015, active guild leader (last login January 3rd, 2016), 2 challenges, 4 gems. Not contacted yet. (Please don't destroy! Chat and concept are entertaining and creative.)
 * Tumblr Crowd: Sighted by @Blue. One of the several tumblr guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). A guild about tumblr in general (and spending too much time there), duplicates Cute and Cool Things on Tumblr to some degree. Last chat December 2014, about two pages of logbook, active captain (last login January 10th, 2016), one dead challenge (with a recently active owner and a 2 gem prize), 2 guild gems. Not hailed yet. Ship looks like a candidate for scuttling (privatizing).
 * Unicorns of Awesome: Discovered by @tenko. A small ship meandering the Seas of Habitica with no apparent purpose, crew members made the last entry in the logbook on October 26th, 2015, the captain is present on the ship as of January 11th, 2016. There are still 4 gems in the coffer to be salvaged, but no challenges. Hailed by @tenko in chat and via PM on January 10th and 12th, 2016. Awaiting reply.
 * UK PC Gamers: Small and fairly inactive guild. 3 active crew members aside the captain. Last logbook entry January 5th, 2016, previous August 19th, 2016, 4 one-liner logs in 8 months. Active captain (last login January 10th, 2016), one dead challenge, 4 guild gems. Not hailed yet.
 * WaniKani<3: Sighted by @keyes. One of the several Japanese learning guilds (see Guilds with Similar Topics). This guild is new and active with an active leader, but clearly duplicates the other (bigger and older) Wanikaniguild. @Mara the Marine Marauder hailed it in chat and asked if they want to merge. It turned out the new guild was created because the guild leader of the old guild was inactive. Now there's an ongoing discussion about merging in the chats of both guilds. (In general, everyone agrees to merge, but the members of the new guild would like to have an active leader in the old guild, which won't be possible before May 19, 2016, because the leader there last logged in on May 19, 2015.) Has one challenge which its active owner could move emself.
 * Wet Paper: Sighted by @cTheDragons. A beautifully presented guild on watercoloring. No chat since 12 August 2015. The first captain @Luna_Rius invested time and effort setting up the guild, but nonetheless it stayed dead. @Luna_Rius eventually decided to sail to different seas and announced they'd "close down" their account. (Account still exists but @Luna_Rius stopped using it soon afterwards - last login 30 August 2015.) Around that time, @Luna_Rius apparently gave captaincy to @Ninja Mom (possibly without @Ninja Mom noticing it - she never did anything in the guild). @Ninja Mom has been active recently (last spotted 5th Jan 2016). The guild once had a challenge which was deleted by the elves (because no one wanted to adopt it). The guild has 4 gems. @cTheDragons PMed the new captain @Ninja Mom on January 18 2016 and also hailed in chat on 23 Jan 2016. No response so far. @Mara the Marine Marauder then made a "Memorial challenge" which contains the guild description (with lots of helpful watercoloring links), logo, and history. If @Ninja Mom doesn't react or doesn't object, the "Memorial challenge" will be moved to the Artists guild (and stay there permanently), and the guild can then be deleted, privatized, or boarded. @Alys has seen the challenge and given approval.
 * Yandere: Refers to a special anime character archetype. Sighted by pirates. A 3 person guild with 13 words (3 chat lines) activity in the last 4 months, an active leader (last login January 2nd, 2016), no challenges, 4 gems. Hailed on January 10th, 2016 by @tenko. both in chat and by detailed PM. @Alys said about it on 23 January 2016: "[...]if it is still inactive in a month, I'll consider privatising it[...]".

Guilds with Similar Topics
For some topics, there are several guilds, and it helps to get an overview which ones there are first, before deciding which ones to delete or privatize. That's what this section is for. If you find more guilds belonging to a topic already covered here, please add them! If you find an inactive guild and you know there are at least two more guilds with a similar topic, and some of them might benefit from merging, please add the topic!

Both the list and sub-lists are alphabetical. These guilds aren't currently a target because most of them are moderately active. The guild leader of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, @keyes, is already a pirate (but also a Harry Potter fan who intends to stay guild leader and keep the guild running). In the long run, the two Hogwarts guilds and Dumbledore's Army might want to merge though. But at the moment, all three are active and have active guild leaders, so it's probably not worth the effort yet. These guilds were found by searching for "Potter", "Rowling", "Hogwarts", and "Gryffindor". If you find any more that aren't listed here yet, please add them! Thanks to @tenko's ongoing efforts to find, list, and inspect Japanese guilds, this list is probably complete. (It was originally based on a search for the English word "Japan" in guild names or descriptions, which found them all but wouldn't have found guilds with completely Japanese names and descriptions.) The list doesn't contain guilds with the topic of learning languages in general, nor guilds that speak Japanese but have a different topic than learning this language. (Currently there is only one other Japanese-speaking guild: 日本語話者の集会所ｶｯｺｶﾘ. The name means "Japanese Speakers Meetup", it is the main Habitican Japanese-speaking guild, it is very alive and the place you would send Japanese newbies to if they want to speak Japanese. It is definitely not a target.) Which of these guilds are worth keeping? (We haven't gotten around to decide yet.) Pirates @keyes and @tenko are fluent in Japanese enough to read the chat and challenges and can see if there's any interesting content. Does anyone else speak Japanese well? If you do and would like to help dealing with Japanese-speaking guilds, please add your name in this paragraph or ask one of the more wiki-savvy pirates to do it for you! There are two guilds for RPG on LiveJournal/Dreamwidth/Plurk. Both are completely inactive (no posts for over a year), both have active leaders. This list is probably very incomplete and isn't even based on a search. If you find more such guilds, please add them! (Please note that these guilds are not necessarily targets for deletion or merging.) This list is based on a search (last repeated on 02 January 2016) for the English word "sleep" in guild names or descriptions (as word or part of a word). It contains all the relevant guilds that came up in the search. Since most of these guilds are inactive, there are efforts to merge most of them into the active  Naps of Power: Habiticans for Better Sleep guild which is about sleep in general. The following guilds are about tumblr in general. (There are also several other guilds about specific tumblr blogs.) @Blue found and mentioned them first, and a guild search for "tumblr" (last repeated on 22 January 2016) confirmed that those are currently all of them. (There was a third one that got deleted already.) Both guilds are inactive and candidates for boarding and/or deletion. (Looking at how inactive they are, Habitica probably just doesn't need a guild dedicated to tumblr in general.)
 * Harry Potter:
 * Dumbledore's Army
 * Gryffindor House
 * Hogwarts
 * Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
 * Hufflepuff Common Room
 * Ravenclaw Common Room
 * Slytherin House
 * Learning Japanese:
 * The JRPG Club
 * Japanese Deep Cave Adventurers
 * The LearnJapanese Guild
 * /r/Team_Japaneseのギルド
 * Wanikani
 * WaniKani<3
 * Plurk:
 * Karma Vacation
 * Plurk Peeps
 * Roleplaying (especially roleplaying inside Habitica, and roleplaying approaches to doing tasks):
 * Habitica Role-Play Challenges (HRPC)
 * Fighters Guild
 * Rangers Guild
 * Space Traders
 * The Arcane Warrior's Syndicate
 * The Archons
 * The Society of Flash and Guile
 * Sleep:
 * Asynchronous
 * Early to Bed and Early to Rise (doesn't have the word "sleep" anywhere in its guild description)
 * Naps of Power: Habiticans for Better Sleep
 * The Cozy Inn of the Drowsy Dragon -- Idiopathic Hypersomnia
 * tumblr:
 * Cute and Cool Things on Tumblr
 * Tumblr Crowd

Guilds We Fought in Battle
So far, we have only fought one guild-vs.-guild battle:

As far as we know, this was the first guild-vs.-guild battle in Habitican history, and contributed to one of Captain Mara's contributor tiers in the "Challenger" category.
 * 1) We attacked Gryffindor Houseon June 15, 2015, and did battle with them for 13 days. As weapons, we used habits asking the participants to "Bravely complete, or work for half an hour on, a terrifying task!". The Gryffindors fought very bravely, and both groups were ahead at several times, but in the end, the pirates won!

We're hoping to do more battles in the future! If your guild (or other group of people) is interested, please let us know!

Captured Guilds
"Captured" means that at some point, one of the pirates became guild leader ("captain").

So far, we have captured 67 guilds in total. Many of those got sunk (i.e., deleted or made private) in the end. (If you want to know how many exactly, look at the section about Sunk Guilds - this wiki page is easier to update if the numbers only appear in one place.)

The first 60 captured guilds have been moved to the Archive. Those here are just the latest:

The Bar Slayers (a guild for people trying to pass the bar exam) had been abandoned by its captain since 2013, and most of its crew had left as well to visit the Barrister's Inn instead. So the remaining crew of one didn't put up a fight, and soon after this caravel had been sighted by @Blue, it got captured by @Ariel. No valuables were found aboard, and the ship was destroyed soon afterwards. @tenko spotted the supposedly extinct time-bending The Future Procrastinators Of Tomorrow ship's wreck, and promptly called for @Ariel to check it for possible survivors. @Ariel boarded the ship, became captain, and is currently evacuating those crew members who are still alive to the Procrastinators guild. Booty challenges might be up soon, and the existing abandoned challenge (with one participant still active) will hopefully be taken care of by the Elves. One bright and sunny day when @Ariel and @tenko were sunbathing .. err, working hard scrubbing the deck, they noticed The Fitbit Warriors catamaran on the horizon. Upon a closer look, they didn't find many of the crew members being fit, and apparently they weren't famed warriors either. @tenko took over the ship, renamed it The Guild Known Previously as The Fitbit Warriors, and cruised it back to the Pirate Cove for looting, with booty challenges running. After those had been won, the catamaran was reduced to timberrrrrr. Hula Hoopers was an ancient looking caravel sighted by @Ariel. When she asked the pirates about it, it turned out that the ship's crew was inactive even in the days of yore, and @Dewines was a member of that crew, then under the alias @Castanwydden. There were no other volunteers to steer that ship, so @Ariel became its new captain, renamed it Pirate Hula Hoopers and set up hula-hooping booty challenges - and before she knew it, veteran hula-hooper @Dewines was surrounded by other pirates asking for advice how to hula-hoop with the life rings. In another part of the Habitican seas, @cTheDragons and @Phantom818 sighted an eccentric galley WizardChan carrying suspicious, possibly magical cargo. They hailed it at the top of their lungs, but there was only the wind there, the ship was abandoned by its crew. @cTheDragons led the takeover, renamed the galley The Guild formerly known as WizardChan, and is currently investigating the curiously shimmering things lying in stock. Interesting booty challenges are already up (prompting the boarding pirates to say "Arrrbrrracadarrrbrrra!" a lot), after which the ship will become a great shooting target for the pirate cannons! The fully computerized ship CakePHP (referring to the open-source web framework CakePHP) ran on autopilot for many years - so much so that no one even noticed that captain and crew had left the ship. They had been gone for more than a year when @Snellopy sighted and @Ariel hailed it. So @Ariel boarded it, managed to log into the ship's computer as its new captain, reprogrammed the ship to show Pirate CakePHP as its new name, and promised booty to those pirates who woud contribute to its code - or that of any other open-source project. Challenges can still be won! The Trust Fortress was sighted, hailed, and boarded fast by @Ariel, who renamed it Pirate Trust Fortress and encouraged eir trusty fellow pirates to build, well, trust (for gems!) - whereas its former crew had mostly talked about caffeine. (We don't know why - by the time the pirates boarded, the former captain and crew were long gone.) Booty challenges can be won now!  Let the future be as bootyful!

Sunk Guilds
"Sunk" means that the guild either got deleted or made private. Making an inactive guild private is frequently used as an alternative to deleting it because, in case any of the guild members ever returns to Habitica and would like to have the guild back or look something up in there, the private guild serves as a backup and can easily be turned into a public guild again. (In some other cases, though, old guilds get privatized because the new guild leader is actually repurposing them as active private guilds, usually with a different name and topic and no intent to conserve the old chat and challenges.)

In Pirate English, if the guild is described as "destroyed", "wrecked", "shot to smithereens", etc., that means it got deleted. If it is described as being sunk in one piece, e.g., "scuttled", "foundered", "submerged", etc., that means it was turned into a private guild (but will most likely be inactive in the future). If it "was turned into a submarine", it was turned into a private guild with an active guild leader intending to use the guild (often with a different name and topic). This terminology is just for the fun of gamification, though - it's not an exact science, please don't take it too seriously! If you use different descriptions when adding a new sunk guild to the list, no one will keelhaul you for it.

So far, we have sunk 69 guilds in total. We captured 30 of those first (they appear in both the Sunk Guilds and Captured Guilds list) and sunk the other 39 without capturing them. 42 of the sunk guilds got destroyed beyond repair, 22 got scuttled in one piece, 5 were turned into submarines.

The first 60 sunk guilds have been moved to the Archive. Those here are just the latest:

Bar Slayers was a ship that once hosted a very diligent crew of voracious readers and eager students trying to pass the bar exam. This was no longer true when it got sighted by @Blue - with the captain gone since the yesteryear and only one crew member remaining, the ship yielded instantly to invading @Ariel, who upon finding no valuables on board, blew it to smithereens.</li> @Llama Hobbit found the Taxidermists guild to be dead and not worth of preserving. So 'e became captain there, cleaned up the armory (i.e., old challenges) with @Cantras's and @Alys's help, and went about dividing the booty with preparation-for-death-themed booty challenges. When all the gold was looted, the ship became a shooting practice target for pirate cannons and sank.</li> After being sighted by @Dewines, the ship dubbed The StudySpo Guild (for followers of StudySpo on Tumblr) was rendered harmless via disposing of its armor and war machinery (i.e. old challenges) by the elves, and then submerged by the pirates. Interested students might be better off on the much bigger ship The Scholars.</li> The George Mason University was a ship that had been abandoned right after its launching. Everything on it was untouched, even the captain hadn't set foot on its deck. Seeing this, @tenko promptly informed Admiral @Alys, who made a prompt decision to submerge this ship in one piece.</li> The Polyphasic Sleepers guild was sighted from the bird's nest on @SabreCat's watch, floating about lifelessly. Possibly fatally exhausted after failed experimentation with the circardian rhythm, the crew was as good as dead, having left 3 entries in the ship's logbook within 2 years, and the captain was recently missing (December 24th, 2015). It was quietly submerged so as not to disturb anyone's sleep.</li> A sweet aroma suddenly filled the entire dock, everyone could clearly smell it. It was the flowery, sugar-laden scent of Sugar Slayers floating around! @Ariel was the first one to notice the flotsam, and quickly established that there already is a diabetics support crew named The SugarKill Gang. She headed the abordage, and discovered loads and loads of delicious gems on board, which she converted to neat challenges for the pirates - you could receive the award for surviving for a full day without any sugar. Pirates quickly finished their tasks, and upon looting the flotsam, the ship was sweetly and swiftly destroyed and put to sleep in Davy Jones' locker.</li> The Fitbit Warriors warship was once home to mighty warriors of the Habitican Seas, who had vanished without a trace by the time it was sighted by @tenko. The captain was apparently last seen on board in 2014, and empty decks were echoing with silence. Hidden in the armory however was a small treasure, so after boarding the ship with @Alys' assistance, @tenko set up challenges in honor of the abandoned unit, "The Warrior Awakens", which were aimed to call forth the pirates' bravery so that they could face their most neglected, feared and loathed To-Do tasks. Gems were awarded to those who had proven themselves doughty. After that, the once formidable warship was reduced to Admiral @Alys's cannon fodder.</li> nyctophilia, one of several sleep related guilds (or maybe rather a "stay awake all night" guild) was sighted and hailed by @Blue. When @Blue found it floating adrift, only its captain @EVe was still alive aboard, and agreed (after discussing some pros and cons with @Phantom818 and a few other pirates) to have the ship destroyed.</li> Just in case (public) was a rather empty and unused ship that its captain (and former pirate) @FelipeNA kept moored at the pier just in case he might at some time in the future have a use for it - because he didn't have the gems anymore to build a new one. When @Mara the Marine Marauder told him that he could always get a guild for free from the pirates, plus he could ask someone with gems to make a new guild for him, retrieve the gems and then make him leader, plus if he had a private guild, he could have that one turned into a public one, @FelipeNA didn't see a need anymore to keep an unused guild in store, and gave permission to have it destroyed.</li> </ol>

Conquering Guilds: Guidelines & Tips
This section isn't finished yet (and will probably always be a work in progress).

Please also look at this page's Talk page to learn how to make the wiki edits corresponding to your pirating actions, thereby keeping the various guild lists on this wiki page up to date!

Possible End Results for Targeted Guilds
Before conquering a guild, you might want to know which end results are possible. These are:

This usually happens if the guild is utterly inactive and/or useless, none of the guild members want to keep the guild alive anymore, and there's no interesting content in the chat or elsewhere in the guild that is worth preserving. (A guild can be useless while still being active - usually if another, more active guild with the same topic exists, and everyone decides to move over to that other guild and give up the "duplicate" guild.) If there are gems in the guild bank, the guild usually gets captured and plundered before deletion. But there's no guarantee for that - an admin may decide to delete the guild immediately, with gems and all. (Why wait when you can get rid of a dead guild now?) If the admin is generous, e can put the "lost booty" in the Pirate Cove's guild bank directly (that's how we got our unusually high number of gems there) - but that's a favor, not something we're entitled to! Making an inactive guild private is frequently used as an alternative to deleting it because, in case any of the guild members ever return to Habitica and would like to have the guild back or look something up in there, the private guild serves as a backup and can easily be turned into a public guild again. Privatization is a good solution if the guild contains interesting content, or someone apparently spent a lot of effort creating it (for example by creating a special guild logo or a complicated challenge), or the guild has a serious and sensitive topic (for example offering support for people with a special health condition), or the guild leader hasn't been away from Habitica for very long yet. If a guild contains interesting content and gets privatized, only its members will still be able to see that content, though, and no new members can join or even find the guild without invitation. If the content (challenges, tips and tricks in chat, links in the guild description, etc.) would still be useful in other Habitican guilds, it should be "rescued" and moved there before the guild gets privatized or deleted. A privatized guild usually keeps its gems. (In some other cases, though, old guilds get privatized as a form of repurposing: There's someone around who would like to have eir own private guild but doesn't have the gems to create one, and there's a guild that would otherwise be deleted - so that person gets the guild, the guild gets privatized by an admin, the new leader throws all the old members out, renames and redesigns the guild, and uses it as eir new private guild, without intent to preserve any of the old content.) That means, the guild stays public but gets a different name and topic and a new leader. That usually happens if, at the same time, there are both a guild that would usually get deleted, and a person who would otherwise create a new guild. That means, the guild keeps its topic and stays public. In some cases, pirates wandering into a guild might serve as a "wake-up call", and the members might decide to try to improve the guild a little - find a new active guild leader, change and improve the guild name and/or description slightly, maybe broaden the guild topic, create new challenges, and/or promote the guild in the The Bulletin Board 📌 or the Tavern. But basically, the guild stays the same (and the guild members are in no way obliged to take any of these actions). This usually happens if pirates ask in guild chat: "Is this guild still active? Is anyone here still interested in keeping it?", and people answer that yes, they want to keep it. If it's already clear from the start that the guild will stay - for example if it's quite active but just has an inactive leader - this isn't usually a job for the pirates! If the active members want a new leader, they can request a leadership change themselves. To quote Admiral @Alys on the matter: "I'd prefer that the Pirates sought new leaders for only guilds that are dead, or near-dead (or ones where the current leader does want to resign, of course). I think it's best that you don't suggest to active communities that you might look for a new leader from outside the community. I'm concerned that it would make the guild members not feel at ease in their own space." Of course, you're free to join the guild and voice your opinions there - that you'd like to have the guild name/description changed slightly, that you'd like to have a new active leader who can do this, that you think the guild could benefit from being promoted in the The Bulletin Board 📌 or with an entry in the Guilds Guide or its own wiki guild page, or whatever - but that's not a pirate action, it's something that you can do as a guild member there, independently of the Pirate Cove (if you want to).
 * The guild gets deleted:
 * The guild gets privatized:
 * The guild gets repurposed:
 * The guild stays more or less as it is:

Technical Details
You might also want to know some technical details - especially which of these things can be done by Habiticans themselves, and which can only be done by admins:


 * Guild deletion and guild privatization can only be done by an admin.
 * Guild leadership can be changed by the current guild leader or by an admin. If the guild leader is still active, it's usually eir decision to change guild leadership (or not), and the guild leader should do the change emself (unless there are technical difficulties, then the admin can help).
 * For moving old challenges out of to-be-deleted guilds, please check the details in our sister guild Elven Grove and their wikia guild page.

There's more technical info on the wiki page about Guilds (especially the sections about Transferring Guild Ownership and Guild Deletion) and the wiki page about Challenges.

If things don't go as planned, it can also be helpful to check for known guild bugs in the GitHub issues. For a more detailed search, here's GitHub's very helpful help page for searching issues. There is a label "groups" (meaning both guilds and parties), and here's the list of all open issues with that label - but relevant issues don't always get labeled. Apparently you can't add labels to issues as a normal GitHub user. Here are some GitHub issues that are good to know about:


 * Guild leaders can assign a new guild leader - only, there's a known bug: The new guild leader can only be chosen from the first 15 members of the guild (the ones that are visible in the Members list). The bug has been documented in GitHub issues 2160 and 1806. Currently, there are two workarounds: You can either ask an admin to assign the new guild leader, or you can use the "plankwalking" method and kick members out of the guild until the person that you want to make leader is among the first 15 that show up in the Members list. (Obviously, this is rather rude and should only be done with small guilds and/or inactive members, and with proper warning.)
 * Issue 3937 is a precedence case where @Lemoness decided that "Guild leadership should only be reassigned when the Guild leader requests it, unless they've left the site completely for a long period of time, such as a year." However, some small inactive guilds got deleted or repurposed lately where the guild leader had last logged in more recently, sometimes only 3 months before deletion. In the end, it's the admins' decision - but the longer the guild leader has been away, the more likely a guild leadership change or guild deletion becomes. If the guild leader hasn't been away for very long (but doesn't react to messages and chat), it's more likely that the guild gets privatized instead.

There is also a Trello card discussing guilds.

Finding a Target
Now that you know about the technicalities, you'll probably want to know how to select a good target:

A good order to look for new targets is: However, these are just guidelines for when you don't know which guild to deal with next. If, for some reason, you think now is the right time to deal with a certain guild, it's fine to do that first. And it's always a good strategy to finish dealing with some of those guilds you're already working on before tackling too many new ones!
 * It should be a guild that has been inactive for a while, and/or has the same topic as another, more popular guild that it could be merged with. Many such guilds are already listed in the Guilds in Our Sights - you can also pick one of those and do the next steps with it if they haven't been done yet.
 * No matter what target you select, final decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis.
 * If you're considering targeting a guild about a certain locality, please note: Each country can have its own guild, unless that guild is extremely dead, in which case you can start a discussion in Pirate Cove chat about deleting or privatizing it. We don't have an exact definition of "extremely dead" but perhaps six months without any activity is enough to warrant starting a pirate discussion. If there are two guilds for the same country, and not enough activity to support two guilds, we might consider a merge (and therefore target the less active one). We do not have any special guidelines for localities smaller than countries.
 * If you're considering targeting a foreign language guild, please note: Each language can have its own guild, no matter how dead the guild is. (At least that was the latest consensus reached - part of the guidelines are still evolving.) If there are two guilds for the same language, and not enough activity to support two guilds, we might consider a merge (and therefore target the less active one). @Alys suggested: "One option when we find a dead language guild is to put a comment in it saying that even though there's no activity, any new speakers are welcome to post, and that might cause older users to start posting again (comment in English then in the Google Translate version in the guild's language)." We'll try this in the future.
 * If you're considering targeting a religion guild, please note: Pirates should not take any actions with religious guilds other than telling @Alys about them. (That can be done in Pirate Cove guild chat if you like, it isn't so secret that you have to use private messaging or email.) @Ays will take care of them herself. She said "I would prefer that they weren't contacted by pirates [...]. There might be subtle differences between the guilds that mean they shouldn't be merged. If any of the guilds are removed, I'll do it with a quick deletion or privatisation, and I won't change any of their owners to Pirates."
 * 1) If you already know of a guild that looks like a good target, please add it to the "Guilds in Our Sights" list! Please add whether it has already been discussed in Pirate Cove guild chat, and if so, which conclusions have been reached.
 * 2) Check the "Guilds in Our Sight" list and look for those in there that seem like easy targets with no (or few) complications.
 * 3) After that, attack from the top of the Public Guilds list downwards. Leave the complicated ones alone at first. (The easy ones usually start somewhere in the middle of the list.)
 * 4) If/when you ge to the bottom of the Public Guilds list, if a guild is probably too new to have had a chance to attract members yet, leave it alone at first.
 * 5) After that (if we ever get there), we can deal with the complicated ones that are left.

Hailing
Now that you have a target in mind, here's how to start attacking:

New (this still has to be merged with the descriptions below):

Latest consensus reached about whether to "hail" a guild before or after discussing it in Pirate Cove chat:
 * When in doubt, only hail after having discussed in Pirate Chat whether (and possibly how) the guild should be hailed.
 * If you're just asking "Is anyone still interested in this guild?" or "Hi, is anyone alive here?" or similar in chat, it's usually ok to do that without discussing the guild in the Pirate Cove first. (People who aren't pirates do it all the time, too.) Possible exceptions are a) guilds with delicate topics and/or apparently sensitive members (where members might feel slighted, pushed, discrimated, etc. by such posts), and b) knowing that you and/or the pirates have a backlog, and that if someone actually reacts and says: "Please do this and that with this guild!", you and/or the pirates won't find the time to take action until much later.
 * If you clearly speak for just yourself and not for the pirates as a group, you can also say whatever you like. (Example: Explaining what the pirates do and what the options are, and then saying: "I haven't discussed this with the other pirates yet and I don't know what they think, but in my personal opinion, ...")
 * If you speak for the pirates as a group (or it can be understood or misunderstood that way), that should best only be done after the guild has been discussed in Pirate Cove chat. (Example: "Yarrrrr! We are the pirates from Pirate Cove! Prepare to be boarded! If you want to keep this guild, ...!")

On the one hand (and most importantly), we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. And also we don't want to hail first and then find out that, for some reason, we don't even want to target the guild. On the other hand, asking "Hello? Is anyone still here?" early on gives people lots of time to react, and that is helpful, too, in many cases.

Older stuff (that still has to be merged with what's been said above - maybe with subheaders "When to Hail" and "How to Hail" (i.e., what to say, PM and/or chat, etc.?):

(When the guild finally gets deleted, privatized, or leadership changed by an admin, that admin will send the guild leader a standard message, too. But the admin's message will only inform the guild leader about it being done, whereas the pirates' message asks the guild leader for their opinion and gives em a chance to intervene.) The guild leader should have some time (at least a week) to answer. If you know that no one else messaged the guild leader yet and if you're sure that the guild is a good candidate for boarding/deletion, you can message em before talking about the guild in Pirate Cove chat. If you aren't sure (whether someone already sent a message, or whether the guild is a good target at all, or what you should write in the message), please talk about it in Pirate Cove chat first. When you message the guild leader, please also update the guild entry in the Guilds in Our Sights list and add the info that you've sent the guild leader a private message (and when), and whether the guild leader has answered yet or not. (Or if you don't know how to edit the wiki, get another pirate to do it for you.) This is especially important because otherwise, no one except the sender and receiver of the message will know about it, and that will lead to other pirates messaging the guild leader, too (because they think it hasn't been done yet), and the guild leader will feel spammed. Once you receive an answer from the guild leader, please tell the other pirates what the guild leader said about what should be done with the guild, and also add that info to the guild entry in the Guilds in Our Sights list (or get someone else to do it for you).
 * If no other pirate has done so yet, "hail" the guild to see if anyone in there is still alive: Ask in the target guild's chat if anyone's still interested in keeping the guild, or if it can be deleted or repurposed (or maybe privatized). If you don't know what to say exactly, check in the last few conquered guilds how things started there! Then feel free to use your own words, adapted to the situation in the guild. Give the guild members at least a week to answer.
 * Talk about the results in Pirate Cove guild chat - either before or after messaging the guild leader (see next step). Discuss whether it would be a good idea to target the guild, and what should probably happen to it (Boarding? Deletion? Repurposing? Privatizing? Or does one of the old members there want to take over and become guild leader?) Check if the guild is already listed among the Guilds in Our Sights. If not (and if it hasn't been discarded as a target), please add the guild to the Guilds in Our Sights list, or get someone who knows how to edit the wiki to do it for you. It is helpful if you add relevant details: When was the last (non-piratic) chat post? When did the guild owner last log in? Are there challenges in the guild? Gems in the guild bank? Interesting content in the chat, guild description, or challenges, that is worth saving? If there is another guild with the same topic, which one? Has the guild leader been contacted yet, and did e answer? Did the other pirates mention anyhting important in guild chat when the guild was discussed?
 * At some point, the guild leader should be messaged (if e didn't react in chat). This makes sense even if the guild leader hasn't logged into Habitica for many months because, depending on their settings, many Habiticans get email notification for private messages. In the message (which should be as polite and respectful as pirates can be), the guild leader should be asked if e's still interested in the guild, or if it can be deleted/repurposed/merged with another guild, or if e'd prefer if it was privatized. If the guild leader owns challenges in the guild, those should also be mentioned. If there are gems in the guild bank, it's fair to also tell the guild leader that e can get them back by making a challenge with the gems and declaring emself as the winner. And, to quote Admiral @Alys, "the guild leaders could also be reassured that if the guild is given to a new owner or deleted, the admin who does it will give them back their gems".

... To be continued.

Pirate Code
... or Pirate Articles. If we weren't pirates, this section would be called F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions). It's just supposed to sum up the answers to the most frequently asked questions in short form. ... To be continued.
 * 1) (Still to be written)
 * 2) (ditto)

Guild-vs.-Guild Battles: The Technical and Organizational Aspects
A "guild vs. guild" (or "team vs. team" - not restricted to guilds) battle challenge can be made simply by making a challenge with only two habits which are identical except for one of them saying "Fight for team A!", the other saying "Fight for team B!". (Of course, the habits should also say what the participants are expected to do.) Then the Habitica Swagger API interface can be used to keep track of the overall values of the two habits. These habit values correspond (roughly, but close enough) to how often the habits have been clicked. The group with the higher habit value wins. The participants simply join the challenge, decide which team they want to fight for, and click the habit of that team whenever they do the work required by the habit.

If the challenge creator wants to find out who fought for which team, they can see this by looking at the CSV file which shows who clicked which habit. The CSV can be downloaded directly by clicking on the "Export to CSV" button in the challenge, or by using the Habitica Swagger API interface again. (Of course, you could also make a to-do "State your loyalty in the Extra Notes!" instead.) This can be helpful if you intend to make token challenges for all the winners (and maybe 2nd place token challenges for all participants of the other team) after the battle.

The habit values correspond to the sum total of work done. If you'd rather declare the winning team by average work done by each team member, you could also divide the habit values through the number of team members, then compare the results.

The mechanics are also discussed on this Trello card(in the April 29, 2015 comment).

The challenge should contain a disclaimer saying approximately this:

"Disclaimer: All this is supposed to be fun for everyone involved! You are not required to participate in the challenge, no matter which guild you belong or don't belong to. Also, if this challenge makes you feel uncomfortable, please talk to the challenge creator and/or the guild leader of [the guilds involved] and/or a Habitica moderator, and we'll try to fix it! We don't want to violate community guidelines and don't want anyone to feel really, non-fictionally, threatened."

If you are planning a guild-vs.-guild fight, it is good manners to contact the guild leaders of the involved guilds first (if they are active). If you're not planning a surprise attack, you can also ask the guild members first via guild chat. If you're not sure how to proceed (especially if one of the guild leaders is inactive), please read the community guildelines first, then contact a Habitica admin/moderator and ask.

The guilds involved should be chosen wisely - they should consist of members who actually like such a fight instead of feeling annoyed by it.

Ideas for Staff
Pirates are currently organizing some ideas to forward to Habitica staff. The page where those ideas are being organized is here.

Different Flags
(Flags not shown to avoid spoilers and copyright issues.)
 * Standard: http://i.imgur.com/oOPGubk.jpg
 * Valentine: http://img0.etsystatic.com/058/0/8817204/il_340x270.716391514_krn0.jpg
 * Pi Day: http://i.ebayimg.com/00/$%28KGrHqYOKiwE5hhLRyDJBOep6qUI8!_35.JPG
 * Easter: http://s7.photobucket.com/user/Cookgirl/media/2013/EasterPirate_zps4e2c6e3a.png.html
 * International Talk Like a Pirate Day: http://wallpaperbang.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Talk-Like-a-Pirate-Day-19-Sep-Wallpapers.jpg
 * Halloween: http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6045/6300391097_108bea7248_m.jpg
 * Thanksgiving: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3064/3063761200_3e481fdbee.jpg
 * Christmas: http://www.theflagshop.co.uk/ekmps/shops/speed/images/christmas-pirate-flag-5074-p.jpg
 * New Year: http://rlv.zcache.com/pirate_new_years_eve_party_invitation_postcard-r83e5412cda1d4e1886fbabd79d6db4b9_vgbaq_8byvr_512.jpg

Obscure Treasure Map to Pirate Music
Mara's recommendations:
 * Listen to Bilgemunky's old podcasts in the Bilgemunky archive! (And then look for more from the bands mentioned there!)
 * "Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag" has a nice piraty soundtrack that can be found in various places on Youtube.
 * Then there are "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" (original and cover version) - also on Youtube.
 * And, of course, all the Disney-copyrighted stuff for "Pirates of the Carribean". Chicken_on_a_Raft.png
 * Thanks to @Dewines for digging up Jimmie MacGregor's version of "Henry Martin"!
 * Then there's also the chicken on a raft.
 * The halftime show at the Viking Horde vs. Sparrow Warriors Super Bowl III serves as a good excuse to put that link here, too.
 * Whenever you're dealing with one of the Harry Potter-themed guilds, it helps to know that Hermione Granger was born on Talk Like a Pirate Day.
 * And so much more...