XF 2.2 Best Theme for World-Class Gaming Forum

Ryan Kent

Ryan Kent

Well-known member
Greetings,

Throne and Liberty is an upcoming MMO developed by NC Soft and being published by Amazon Games. I wish to create the top forum support website for the game using XF Cloud. I am looking for recommendations / assistance in three areas (if this is not the best area for this post, please let me know):

1. What are the top themes for a quality gaming forum?

2. What recommendations do you have for storing videos / images uploaded from users? I will be using the STARTER CLOUD package which has a 50 GB limit. I expect with user videos for that limit to be exceeded very quickly. I wish to store some original content on the website without using YouTube or other public sites.

3. When I started with XF many years ago, there was a forum area for XF developers offering their services. I am seeking assistance to install the theme and make customizations to the website. What is the best way to locate quality XF developers?

Kind Regards,
-Ryan
 
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For #1.... I'd look at engaging a custom style with one of the major style developers... like PixelExit or Doh'Themes (I use PixelExit personally).
For #2.... you could use CloudFlare R2 storage or Amazon S3 to increase the capacity. Or you could get a VPS and do it via an NFS mount (not the most reliable way, I'd recommend R2/S3). This would allow increased storage for uploaded videos... but there is a cost involved.
For #3, if talking style tweaks, you can work with whomever you did in #1... if referencing add-ons... I can't make a valid recommendation for customizations.
 
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  1. Use Bolt as I have found it to be the easiest to customize without too much overhead; UI.X could be a possibility, but it's heavy and they deviate from XF quite a bit for their markup.
  2. Don't host your own videos, especially if you're doing cloud hosting. Media Gallery is probably just fine (I also recommend using the add-on I commissioned as it helps with mirroring things into albums: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/ozzmodz-xfmg-attachment-mirroring-album.8604/).
  3. You should be able to do a lot of the customization you want to do yourself with Bolt; if you need graphics, probably look towards Fiverrr as it'll be less expensive 🤷‍♂️.
Rather than investing heavily into your style initially, focus on getting content up that is relevant (and not AI generated; that is actually going to destroy your credibility) and game-specific tools like build planners and the like. You will likely be struggling against very big data mining sites, so do not try to invest heavily until you get at least a good community built. If you're having the idea to do this, so is everyone else following the game.
 
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Brogan said:
Feel free to build out your own Cloud service and allow external storage.
Click to expand...
Valid question @Brogan.... is there a technical reason, or is it more to do with the bandwidth needed to support such?
I know that it requires more since the images are stored at another location... so apparently by your sarcastic response, there IS no technical reason but it's a financial/resource usage one.
The "ouch" was in reference to the fact that could hurt some folks that might otherwise be interested in using it.
It's simply one more reason that I personally would not choose the cloud solution offered. And I'm sure others might like to be aware of that... I have no desire to dig through to see what "limitations" are listed for the cloud hosting offering... since I don't ever plan on utilizing it.
 
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The reason is because that's the decision the company owners took.

I don't believe they're obligated to explain their decision making to anyone.
 
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Brogan said:
The reason is because that's the decision the company owners took.

I don't believe they're obligated to explain their decision making to anyone.
Click to expand...

Agreed... and since R2/S3 support is native to XenForo self-hosted... it was a conscious decision to remove that ability from the cloud hosted option. Thanks for clarifying that the cloud doesn't offer the same functionality that the self hosted does.... may help in decision making processes for others debating between the cloud and stand-alone offering.
 
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Brogan said:
Not with Cloud you can't
Click to expand...
So if I use the Cloud service, there is no way to set it up so users can press an UPLOAD button and send their video files to Amazon storage, then the forum uses a link to that video file and play it?

I am unclear here as people upload files to YouTube all the time and share those files on forums. You can see the video's thumbnail, press play and view it while still on the forum. That cannot be done with the XF cloud?
 
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Ryan Kent said:
So if I use the Cloud service, there is no way to set it up so users can press an UPLOAD button and send their video files to Amazon storage, then the forum uses a link to that video file and play it?
Click to expand...
Not Brogan... but from what he stated, you cannot use a service like R2/S3 on the cloud to host your image/video files elsewhere to conserve storage space. They can only be hosted on your cloud instance.
There is nothing to stop those users from uploading those video to YouTube or such and then embedding it (this is a separate process than direct video uploads to your site). The thing that you are going to be limited by (and from what it sounded like you were asking about) is users uploading video directly to your site. That is a supported XenForo feature... but for cloud, it uses up the storage you purchase in that account and you cannot offload it to R2/S3 like you can with the standalone script.
It is a trade-off... if you see that your site may need a lot of storage, the cloud solution may not be the best option (albeit from a server administration aspect it is). Depending on how much income your site brings in, you my not be able to off-set the cost of having a larger cloud instance. I don't know if they sell "chunks" of storage that you can add to your cloud account or not. They do have an offering for "unlimited storage" as a surcharge.
 
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The challenge for me is...gaming videos take up a LOT of space. I wish to use Cloud Hosting so the site is 100% professionally managed, backed up, optimized, etc. I have maintained servers and VPS in the past. Issues arise, they take time to address, etc. In my experience it is best handled by someone who does that work full-time.

To be clear, by trade I am a database developer and administrator...but all the intricacies of hosting take time, knowledge, experience, tools to run at it's best. The challenge for me is I foresee needing TBs of storage space and even the max plan only offers 250 GB. I wish XF space as something which could be purchased on an add-on basis as needed. Assuming that is not an option, can anyone share a suggestion for a high quality XF host? I realize there are 1000s of hosts, but I prefer one with specific XF knowlegde who basically offers the same as the Cloud Hosting package from XF but allows videos to be shared with Amazon cloud.
 
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Ryan Kent said:
I wish to use Cloud Hosting so the site is 100% professionally managed, backed up, optimized, etc. I have maintained servers and VPS in the past
Click to expand...
You may want to inquire about a VPS (or maybe even his higher end shared hosting) from MattW Services. It's self-hosted script, and his VPS instances can be (I think by default are) managed by him. He's one of the few I would trust to get into the guts of my system.
There are a few others here that also offer decent hosting. You can also get managed services with KnownHost. They are one of the more reliable providers also, but I have no first hand knowledge with them, but many have used them and are happy.
The benefit is.. with self-hosted, you now have access to R2/S3 storage, and with the server being managed, that headache is taken away from you.
Ryan Kent said:
The challenge for me is I foresee needing TBs of storage space and even the max plan only offers 250 GB.
Click to expand...
You can contact XenForo and see what their "unlimited storage" option would add to the cost of the cloud plan you settled on... but I have a feeling in the long run it would be cheaper to obtain a managed VPS instance from one of the two above providers.
@MattW has been around here for ages... and is well versed in both server maintenance and XenForo. I think there's a KnownHost employee that also hangs out here, but I don't remember for sure.

I would still suggest doing your own off-site backups... it's just a good safety precaution and using rsync it's not that hard to do.
 
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