This is a copy and paste, perhaps expanded from my Profile Post. I see no reason to sit on valuable information and insights regarding tech, since I've always been about promoting new technology. I hope you will make use of this information and it provides some benefit to the Forum.

@Eluvatar and Team:

I understand that there may be some addon related issues at hand, @Artemis could likely advise on that since they helped with Alexandria's upgrade from XF 1.5 and could recommend the addons I used to replace XF 1.5 functionality. While @mcmasterdonia has access to the XenForo community site, whoever holds the license in use for this forum can also designate up to three forum accounts on the XenForo community site to have the same access to download addons and access customer only areas. I do not recommend changing the access list regularly as it may be rate limited.

XF2.1 comes with a native table editor, which will likely make life a fair bit easier. It also features native reactions as well! There was also a means of importing reactions from other XF addons, but I don't see any of those in use here. Reactions can be disabled as well.

There are also quite a few free themes available, as well as good quality premium ones. The Developers I'd recommend are AndyB, Snog, Xenfocus and Themehouse (links below)

Although I'd recommend strongly staying away from Dragonbyte Tech's Addons. The short version is that user data is not safe with them currently, the longer version includes multiple criminal convictions in Scotland last year. You can ask @Artemis and @St George for more information and links, based on a disturbing news article circulating the Forum Admin community on TAZ.

There is also several great Discord-Forum integrations available that really do make life so much easier. It's also possible to automate so many things - particularly quite a few of the forms that TNP enjoys so much. @Artemis in particular found the forms particularly enjoyable to play with, since they also feature auto-promoting, voting and approval which can be set per form. Artemis may be able to provide a demo of it on one of their test sites.

In terms of Discord integration, I used 8WayRun's, which was $30/35 and I'd recommend it, but there are a few others. I also used Snog's Application Forms, and TH's expanded user criteria (for promotions, group controls, etc) and their user improvement mod (both of these were free last I knew).

Some cost related issues, AndyB's mods require a membership of his site which is $35 per year but his license allows you to install on an unlimited number of sites, with unlimited updates for that period. So if say Europeia and TNP were to have one admin with duties on both, then they'd be able to provide a whole range of functionalities for both communities. I'm just going to pop a screenshot here with some of the mods Andy offers that I've found absolutely essential.

9tENUye.png

Themehouse and Snog offer addons priced per unit, although Themehouse also offers a subscription which grants all of their XF2 addons in one package for a yearly sum of around $130 or somewhere in that region. They've discontinued their monthly offerings which amounted to more per year, so this was a good package, and their quarterly is $50 every four months.

Anyhow, Xenfocus have a huge range of themes, some of which are really customisable and would look great when it comes to trying to replicate the old theme from the Zetaboard. Themes tend to be priced at $30/35 with a six/twelve month update period, with $10 for renewal for another period after that. The license renewal is for updates, not usage. I've personally used Uniform, Aperture and Focus in the past for Alexandria and I remember them being really great base templates for styling.

Banner Groups, which involve banner stacking modifications and allowing to group people up to display multiple roles in the same category, I can provide screenshots of them in use on one of my sites if necessary. This addon is not currently publicly available for XF2, and I don't believe McMasterdonia has access to it. I would be willing to provide it to TNP if there is interest for it.

Links:
https://snogssite.com/
https://www.themehouse.com/
https://www.xf2addons.com/ (AndyB's)
https://xenfocus.com/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/xf2-8wr-discord-integration.6058/(the XF2 Discord-Forum Bridge)

-LR
It is odd using those initials, since I haven't used them for a year and a half now.
 
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