YakTribe Forum Upgrade
The last few days I've been updating the forums to the latest version of XenForo plus a lot of additional plugins and changes. This has been the largest update to the forum systems since I first moved from the old SMF to XenForo. Due to the amount of changes, many members of YakTribe and people used to regular forum behavior may experience some initial confusion due to the new Topics system.
My goal is to provide as much instruction as possible on how to get the best experience from the community in the form of videos and online guides. These should be available very soon.
You'll find a list of updates to the Underhive Tools over
here. This is a list of changes to the forums and other components of the site:
- XenForo forum version updated from 1.5 to 2.1
- Overall styles changes to new UI.X Pro theme with custom styling
- Gallery and Vault updated to XF2 versions
- Gallery now contains many Categories for common GW games present here and other general categories. You may add your albums to either the categories or personal albums, the latter allowing you to set your own privacy permissions.
- All existing gallery albums that had images being used for gangs and fighters on the tools have been associated with the Necromunda/Gangs category, the only category that is visible to the tools going forward.
- Onsite Chat system replaced with a new robust chat interface with many new features. You should see the chat bar at the bottom of the browser. Discord is separate from this onsite chat and is not affected.
- Member map has been removed for now until a replacement is available. This means all location systems on the main Yak site are no longer functional. The player meet system is mostly complete but is now awaiting a replacement mapping system.
- Friends system replaced with Guilds (see below for details)
- Tournament system added (see below for details)
- Bookmarks system allows you to bookmark posts, threads, albums, media, vault items and add comments to the bookmark for later use. Want to remember where this great post was on a certain subject? The search function failing you? Bookmarks are your friend.
- Reactions now include more than Like. You can react with several different emotions now. Reactions provide scores just like previously with Likes, however there are is negative scoring implemented, only positive and neutral.
- Push notifications now available. The first time you access the forums it will ask to enable push notifications. This will push relevant alerts to your browser, OS or phone the way many modern applications function nowadays. You may turn on/off push notifications at any time and you can customize alert and push notifications for many aspects of the site separately.
- Table support added to editor. Part of the core XenForo experience, you now have access to adding tables to posts without having to generate all the BBcode yourself. There are buttons on the editor interface for adding the tables and components.
- Improved Gallery embedding for posts. Displaying albums and media directly from your gallery is now much easier and displays far better than the old version.
- Covers have been added. These allow content owners to create custom covers for many aspects of the forums. Thread starters can add a custom cover, perfect for hobby logs! Set custom covers for your user profile and vault entries as well. Upload images, position as needed or set a custom color.
- Post Comments are now available. When replying directly to a post, you can now either Reply as normal or make a Comment. The conceptual difference is that a Comment is simply a quick response to a particular post that is not intended to further the whole thread conversation. Want to simply say "thanks! This was really helpful" but didn't want to simply leave a Like? Post a Comment which appears directly inside the post, not added to the end of the thread. Remember, they're not intended for long conversations and don't allow multi-layer branching like Reddit, only a reply depth of 2 is currently allowed.
- Trending is a new way to see what is going on in the community. Based on a combination of factors, it presents any threads or even media and vault entries that are currently active or "trending".
- Topics and Nodes system introduced for forum and thread management (see below for details)
Guilds
A direct replacement for the old Friends system, the
Guilds integration takes local groups to the next level. You are able to create your own guild which at its basic concept is a group of your gaming friends who may play all types of games together. Once a guild is created, you can visit each of your friend's profiles on YakTribe and Invite them to the guild. What can you do with a guild?
Rosters
Create a Roster of players for a specific game featured here. You may create multiple rosters, each for different games and members. The member must be part of your guild to join the roster though. A roster for Necromunda Underhive will grant direct access to add gangs to a campaign in the Underhive tools, just like the old Friends system. You won't need to find and invite gangs if all campaign participants are members of the roster.
Tournaments
In addition to tools integration, the Guilds and Rosters also integrate with the new
Tournaments system. You can create tournaments for any featured game here or a general tournament. You can create a solo tournament which is simply any users on YakTribe, or a team tournament integrating with the Rosters. There are many different types of tournaments available with the ability to add description, rules, min and max players and other options.
Want a game added to YakTribe for integration with these functions? Simply
contact me and I'll get it added.
Topics and Nodes
Just to add onto all the new features, the updated forums includes a new Topics and Nodes system. The nodes enhances each forum section, allowing me to customize the look and behavior and these will gradually be enhanced over time as I get used to the functionality and really customize the experience. The Topics changes the way threads work with the nodes (forums).
The biggest changes for Topics on the forum is the Necromunda section. Instead of its own dedicated category and separate forums, it's now a single node. Inside that node you'll find all the threads from all the old sections in the one place. Instead of visiting each separate forum, you can now simply toggle on/off each Topic within that node to focus on what you want. The same goes for posting a new thread where you can select the Topic relevant to the discussion and even select another.
You can also select Topics from other nodes, if they're available as sub-topics. This will allow them to be found even when a user is looking at all threads or trending view and focusing on specific topics.
