TandemXenForo add-on

Open a Discord server next to a forum and you usually end up with two communities. The conversation moves to the server, the forum goes quiet, and whoever only reads the forum never learns what they missed. Linking accounts and syncing a role does not change that. Tandem does both, then brings the talk home.

The lounge: your Discord, inside your forum​

A member opens the Discord page of your forum and finds your server: channels, threads, replies, reactions, images and who is around. They type an answer on the forum and it lands on Discord under their forum name and avatar. Someone answers on Discord and it appears on the page with no refresh. A native widget carries the latest messages to your sidebar or home.

Live, on the hosting you already have​

Forum to Discord takes about a second. The other way is the hard part: Discord only pushes messages over a permanent connection, which shared hosting cannot keep open. So Tandem has two modes and always tells you which one you are in.

• Standard, nothing to install. While someone is watching, the forum checks Discord every few seconds, then tells open pages through Pusher, Soketi or any compatible server. It can reuse your Messenger settings. With no relay, pages simply poll.
• Instant, with the small companion. One file with no dependencies, on any VPS with Node 22, listens to Discord and signs what it sends to your forum. Messages, edits and reactions reach the page in about half a second, and members see who is typing. A button writes the docker-compose file for the companion and Soketi.

If a relay or the companion stops, pages fall back to polling on their own and return when it comes back. The live signal carries no content: each page reloads only what its reader may see.

Everything else your Discord needs, in one add-on​

• Link and join. One click links the account and brings the member onto your server.
• Roles by rules. A Discord role plus XenForo's own criteria: groups, messages, trophies, tenure. Preview shows what any member would get and why. Discord roles can give forum groups too.
• Log in and register. Separate switches, so you can allow Discord log in without opening registration to it.
• Announcements. Chosen forums to chosen channels, filtered by prefix, plus a Share to Discord button for your team.
• Slash commands. /link, /whois, /latest and /search answer inside Discord and only give what a guest could read.
• Welcome card. A generated image in your accent colour, optional.

Made for the person who has to run it​

A Getting started page reads your real server and walks you through the application, token, intents, role position and permissions, with one-click fixes where Discord allows them. The bot never needs Administrator. Secrets are never shown again once saved.

Reserved channels stay closed until you open them, and the lounge stays out of search engines. A member can take a role that removes them from the lounge, and a privacy text is ready to copy. Normal forum pages gain no query, every module switches off by itself, and uninstalling leaves nothing behind.

Good to know​

You pay once. You create your own free Discord application and bot, and Getting started shows how. Requires XenForo 2.3 and PHP 8.1 or later. Built and tested on XenForo 2.3.13 with PHP 8.3, and installed cleanly on 2.3.11. Older 2.3 versions and PHP 8.1 were checked by reading the code, not by running it.

Before release the whole chain ran against a real Discord server, with a real bot, a real Soketi server and a real browser: about half a second from Discord to the page with Instant, about five seconds with Standard, about a second from the forum to Discord. Pusher's cloud, Discord log in and registration, and slash commands answering a real member were only run against faithful test servers, so try those on your own server before you announce them.

Tandem does not turn Discord threads into forum threads, and it does not import from other Discord add-ons.