Pick-up Groups (PuGs) for dungeons are almost required here in Classic. Almost no guilds have enough people online that they can form guild dungeon groups at appropriate levels, much less appropriate roles (tank/healer/CC/DPS).
We all know about people who quit PuGs in the middle of a dungeon, groups with impatient players who ignore polite teamwork in their quest for loot, etc.
What successful strategies do YOU have for finding acceptable people for a dungeon group?
There are none. The more difficult roles (tank, then healer) get too much grief and mostly play with people they know.
The only successful strategy i can relay is take your time to remember the good ones. If your not one of those people who wants to add people to your friends list make your own list and use the /who to contact them.
Gotta build your guild friend - pugs are jerks to tanks/healers and many times tanks/healers are jerks to pugs. The tanks and healers I’ve seen mostly just run guild groups.
The only strategy I have for pugging though is sitting in cities posting in all available channels, including the world and lfg channels, until you get one. Or asking someone already in the group to find a guildie that can run with us.
A member’s guildie is more likely to run the pug if members of their guild are in it. At least that’s what I’ve seen.
I’ve also gotten added and add tanks regularly to my friends list to ask. I’ve had some success with that.
Yes this is how it works best when you make pugs if you like the way someone plays ask if you can add as friend
Join a better guild? Or server?
/who Warrior <level range>
/tell <name> Hey, want to tank <Dungeon Name>
That’s what a lot of people do. This is my alt and I get a barrage of tells whenever I log into this character.
I add every decent player I group with to my friends list, especially the tanks. There’s a massive tank shortage in my Guild, and an even greater abundance of healers. So as a healer, I end up pugging most of my runs at least for a tank, and I’ve added at least 10 tanks to my list, and it’s helped me get into dungeons a lot faster
Thanks everyone.
Aside from trollish answers, it seems that everyone keeps a private list of people they consider “good” in groups, to supplement whomever they can find from within their guild.
There appears to be no “magic formula” of what to say in the LFG post to maximize your chances of finding decent people. In fact, friends, and friends-of-friends, appears to be significantly superior to the random people acquired via an LFG post.
Yeah man, most of the time you won’t find “quality” players and will just have to trudge through it unfortunately. Had the worst tank ever in SM last night, wiped multiple times, but since the server I chose for my alliance alt has a lower population, beggars couldn’t be choosers 
For rl reasons I haven’t done many groups yet. But when I grouped in vanilla it wasn’t either a guild run or a pug. There were shades of grey. A guild member would announce in guild chat they wanted to do x dungeon. Hopefully a tank and/or a healer would join. If it was me, a healer, and a couple of dps we’d all look at our friend’s list and whisper tanks we knew who weren’t in our guild. As a last resort we look to fill out the group in trade chat.
I rarely did a 100% pug. I rarely did a 100% guild run. If there were a few guildies and something went wrong we’d stick together and support each other to get the run fixed or done. We’d even talk about it with each other in guild chat. i might tell my guild mates that this pug tank isn’t holding aggro and I’m getting beat on so much I can’t heal. One of my guild mates might say they’ll keep an eye on it and try to pull it off me. It’s not like a pug with 5 strangers none of which know each other.
Gather all the pug team mates and create a guild with them.
Roles are the issues in general.
Just like in LFG dps are usually waiting the longest while tanks have insta Qs (been like that since start of LFG). In in our guild, we have plenty of 60 / levels to run everything with several groups. But while we can fill with dps instantly…sometimes the tanks are all busy or offline. Then comes heals…
Best advice I can give…roll a tank or make friends with a tank. Whisper the tank and just say , “hey, if you going, feel free to invite”. Sometimes they will. More and more and it becomes quicker and quicker.
Hell 4 of us guildies ran DM with a pug tank from a previous run. He ended up joining the guild that same night. So now we got another tank. 
Bring a warlock and advertise summons.
Bring a mage and advertise free food and water.
Say you have punch and pie. More people will come if you say you have punch and pie.
I have literally had no problem getting PUGs and I actually have only had one bad experience for a PUG. In this SM Arm Horror story, tank refused to tank without his beloved 2h and couldn’t hold aggro so i kept going OOM trying to save everyone. It had the happy ending though. I hearthed out and the guy that was doing the least dps had the audacity to whisper that I was a terrible healer and then block me lol! IDK though, maybe it is just my server being PVE where people are a little nicer and more into PUGs
I also get this on my Pally, and so far I’ve found those runs easier than the LFM/LFG ones spammed in Looking for Group chat.
guild groups can be jerks too, they say all righteous orbs etc… are for guilds in dungeon runs, bloody weird guild rules…
Ive been successful so far by using LookingForGroup.
I filter it by throwing out anyone who says that x is reserved or ms>os. Those two filter out most of the tryhard inflexible people who are gonna throw a fit if something doesn’t go their way.
Do people actually have this many problems? Play your class well, be friendly, and have fun.
Yeah but I mean if they’re pugging like one person I can see how they’d do that. But I never run random guild runs as that pugged person with a reserve cause they tend to be jerks, as you said.