Poll What should I build next? You decide

[Gwendal]

The roadmap has always been shaped by requests: Classified's trust ratings and Watch Party's room categories both started as forum posts. Time to make that official.

The poll above lists the ideas I hear most often. Pick up to three. Votes are public, and you can change your mind anytime.

How this works

• The poll stays open permanently. I check it before planning every release cycle.
• Your idea is missing? Vote "Something else" and post it below: the well-argued ones graduate to the roadmap.
• Already shipped ideas move to the roadmap thread.

Want to make a strong case for your pick? How to write a great suggestion is the cheat sheet.

 

[Gwendal]

A quick update from the workbench: Wordle is almost done and ships first, as promised in the build log.

This poll decides what I start right after, so if you have not voted yet, now is the moment. And if your idea is not in the list, post it below: the best suggestion so far gets built with its author as design partner.

 

[Frode]

I would be really interested to see what you would do with a portal solution! Since I really enjoy your design style and quality. Modular and easy customization).

 

[Gwendal]

I would be really interested to see what you would do with a portal solution! Since I really enjoy your design style and quality. Modular and easy customization).

Thank you for your kind words. What do you mean by “portal”? Tell me more

 

[Frode]

Your vote option above in the poll - frontpage portal

With news articles, modular design so you can drag and drop various widgets and content between positions on the front page, to make sure it presents your best content to bring in new users. For example one widget could be a Trending feed that contains stuff like news, regular threads, media, new game (game db) entries, reviews (game db) and so on.

 

[Gwendal]

Your vote option above in the poll - frontpage portal

With news articles, modular design so you can drag and drop various widgets and content between positions on the front page, to make sure it presents your best content to bring in new users. For example one widget could be a Trending feed that contains stuff like news, regular threads, media, new game (game db) entries, reviews (game db) and so on.

Yes, what I meant to say was, how would you see it? Sorry for not expressing myself clearly ^^ Thanks for the information

 

[Frode]

More addon ideas! (if you are interested, just stop me if not LOL).
- Workshop/Test hub!
- Campaign/Session Journal & Community Game Stats (GameHub requirement - potentially paid addon with extra features for communities that want a deeper integration).

Workshop/Test Hub (Price: 60 EUR? - I'd make sure to get a great and feature-rich platform before releasing):
This is the main one. The idea is that this is a pretty flexible content platform that can work for a wide array of areas. It can be a board game, video game, mod, custom bike/car modification, app, etc. If the user has GameHub, there is an optional integration to that addon. (workshop creator can create a new project and optionally add it directly to the game database).

The user creates his own workshop space within the addons ecosystem. He can then create items within his workshop - for example a new video game. With details such as:

• Cover/banner
• Title
• Creator/team (select other users or free-text input)
• Type/category (selected categories in ACP which fits for your website)
• Development status (colored, can be updated through-out, and updates will be posted in the discussion thread)
• Short description
• Tags
• Follow/watch
• Discussion Thread

Then development updates can be posted (structured as dev-blogs, and you can load some design elements from the campaign/session journal addon below for coding/time efficiency ). Versions/build is also listed on and can be updated.

Then an important area - testing:
The creator can make a test session, either private, invitational or public!

Playtest #6 — Balance Test​

Testing version: 0.7
Players/testers needed: 4–8
Focus: Balance & pacing
Status: Recruiting

Join Test

Structured feedback:
The users provide proper feedback in the workshop discussion section. (linked threads in a dedicated forum, uses the same idea as gamehub that links to X db entry).

1. Tested: v0.7
   Overall experience: 4/5
   
   What worked well?
   Combat felt much faster.
   
   What didn't?
   Economy became too strong after round five.
   
   Issues / bugs:
   ...
   
   Additional comments:
   ...

The creator can then mark feedback:
✓ Reviewed · ✓ Implemented · Won't change · Needs more testing
AI mockup:


Campaign/Session Journal & Community Game Stats:
An advanced version of some features already in the GameHub (play logging). This improves that further, as well as adding vital statistics to improve the usefulness of the database and further make your website (and the db) provide better content. The Gamehub is a brilliant starting point, but we need more ways to add unique content to the users databases to improve their content value. Intented as a paid separate addon, alternatively add into the base addon for a price increase to 50 EUR?

Campaign/Session Journal (can work for both digital games and board games)

• Create campaign/session function
• Members/characters
• Sessions
• Notes/photos
• Scenario/chapter progression
• Campaign-specific statistics
• Completed/abandoned/active status
• Auto posted to forum (select which one). Handles the comments in the journal entry (they are pulled from the forum thread).

AI mockup to get across the general idea:


Play logging (already exists, vital to further improve on and log properly for the next module)

• Players
• Winner
• Scores
• Duration
• Location
• Expansions/modules used
• Comments/photos

Community Game Stats for all games in the database
Perhaps a separate menu entry for more stats, while also showing the most important stats on each individual game page.

• Plays
• Unique players
• Average duration
• Average play time per player
• Average scores
• Most common player count
• Plays over time
• Most active players
• Popular expansions
• Repeat-play rate

And then allow reports to be posted automatically (if enabled in ACP) to X forum or to only the activity log on GameHub.
That means the websites eventually creates their own valuable dataset, which is much more valuable than merely importing information from elsewhere.

Games played this week

1. Terraforming Mars — 38 plays
2. Dune: Imperium — 31
3. Ark Nova — 27

AI mockup to get across the general idea:

 

[Gwendal]

Please don't stop, this is exactly the kind of feedback that shapes what gets built next.

The Campaign/Session Journal & Community Stats idea lands on very fertile ground: GameHub already tracks sessions, play logs and per-player stats under the hood, so what you're describing is the missing layer on top rather than a rebuild. The "your community builds its own dataset" angle is exactly how I think about it, that's the moat. I'm seriously looking at this as a paid expansion for GameHub owners, and your breakdown just became its first draft spec. One question: for the campaign journal, do you see board game campaigns (Gloomhaven-style) and digital ones needing different fields, or does one structure cover both for your community?

The Workshop/Test Hub is a bigger beast. Genuinely exciting, and I don't think anything like it exists for XenForo. The structured playtest loop (recruit, versioned feedback, triage) is the part that makes it special. It would be a major project on the scale of my store platform, so I want to scope it properly rather than promise it lightly. Could you tell me a bit about the communities you'd see using it: is this mainly for your own board game crowd, or do you run/know modding and indie dev communities too?

No dates promised (we've all seen how that goes ) but both of these are now pinned above my workbench.

 

[Frode]

Thanks! Happy to be of assistance! I suck at coding, but I do like to play around with ideas, testing and brainstorming

Yeah that sounds excellent! Indeed, users get a much more useful database for their sites when there is more unique value and content there, that is not stored elsewhere (especially by the users of said community themselves). So, some users might not need the advanced layer, hence the idea that this would be an optional addon for the main addon. I just fed into all my ideas into the AI and I'd say the output was fairly close to what I envisioned! The improved stat section just complementes the GameHub idea perfectly!

I think as far as digital/board games, I think it's fairly flexible and would require a very minimum of changes for the board game version (if any). If we try to fit a fairly flexible field set that can work for more areas (and potentially other areas like cars etc, if in the future GameHub is released in other versions or becomes more modular).
I think both campaign and session work in terms of naming, as there are also campaign-style digital games (like Elders Scrolls, Elden Ring etc). Maybe up to the posting user? As for other fields that might be conflicting, users could also perhaps re-name some fields by using phrases, if they like?

Yeah definitely a bigger beast haha! So this would be sort of a long-goal addon project, which I think is good. Making sure the feature set, design idea and scope works as well as intended, because going public. At least not in the scope I had in mind as the vision, no there is no real alternative. There are some project-like addons, but they are not a proper workshop/test hub addon, more like what you have personally as your own project/draft board.

So yeah, the idea here is that the user-base are important testers, to help you realize your idea, further building upon that community enhancing factor, which is vital to make a forum work in 2026. If you can field some unique features and integrate it properly into your community, you have another ace up your sleeve to get more traffic.
I have lots of ideas for how this COULD work in practice (a snap shot of it is visible in the AI mockup).

The addon main page would feature as the test hub, where users can post their stuff for visibility, testing, feedback, discussion and more.
The general idea is that it would work for a wide array of areas: Games being one (naturally, with the GameHub addon), but also addons (for coding/developer forums), mods/plugins (think minecraft mods, which is huge), PC modding/overclocking/PC builds (they can use all other features outside of the actual physical testing), 3D printing (making new designs or testing/tweaking old designs), various DYI projects, graphic design, music/video production, web development etc.

The coding/addons/mods/web development being the best use cases outside of the gaming part. So to build it as flexible as possible to catch a larger field, not just gaming. The underlying addon remains identical.

My site could configure:
Player count · Playing time · Prototype type · Complexity

A coding forum:
Programming language · Framework · OS · Software version

A car forum:
Make · Model · Year · Engine · Modification type

A 3D-printing forum:
Printer · Material · Nozzle · Layer height


Example for 3D priting forum:

Adjustable Filament Spool Holder
v1.4 · Testing
Downloads:
SpoolHolder_v14.stl
Assembly.pdf

Current test:

v1.4 Fit & Durability Test

Need testers using:
Bambu Lab
Prusa
Creality

Feedback could capture:
Printer: P1S
Material: PETG
Layer: 0.20 mm
Print successful: ✓
Fit: 4/5
Strength: 5/5
Issue: Bearing socket approximately 0.3 mm too tight.

Developer releases v1.5.

 

[Gwendal]

Late to answer, and your answers settled the two things I was stuck on.

Campaign / Session Journal. One flexible field set it is. That is the answer I was hoping for, because two parallel structures, one for board games and one for digital, would have doubled the work and halved the quality. You are also right that phrases solve the naming problem: a community that wants Chronicle instead of Campaign, or Run instead of Session, is one phrase edit away rather than one feature request away. So the rule becomes campaign or session, the poster picks, instead of an admin option nobody agrees on.

The part I keep coming back to is what you said about the data. A board that records its own play history owns something no external database can hand it, and that is worth building carefully. Which is why it belongs as an optional layer on top of GameHub, rather than something that bloats the catalogue for boards that only want a catalogue.

Workshop / Test Hub. Agreed, and I am glad you framed it as a long-goal project rather than a next-release one. Shipping half of it would be worse than not shipping it, because the value is in the loop being complete: recruit, versioned feedback, triage, ship. So it stays on the roadmap without a date, and you get a scope proposal to shoot at before a single line of code exists.

Both are now written into the roadmap thread, which I rewrote today after you pointed out it had gone stale.

And since the thread is open again: the poll above still decides what starts after Wordle. If you are reading this and have not voted yet, that is the two minutes with the most influence on my next month.

 

[Frode]

Can't wait to see this in action, I think the campaign/journal and the improved statistics page will really add tons of great options for admins and the users to fill their database with valuable content!

Good to hear, I am just happy it is on there, even without any promised dates You have lots of great products now, and it is probably wise to focus on them until you have time for this huge undertaking, and getting it just right so it hits the ground running with all the functionality needed

 

[Gwendal]

Focus first is exactly right, and it is what the next few weeks look like.

Wordle finishes, then the public statistics page for GameHub, because it is small enough to build properly and useful enough to matter on a board with a real catalogue. The Campaign / Session Journal comes after that, and it gets a spec posted here before any code exists.

One thing did land today though, and it came out of exactly this habit of yours of thinking out loud in public: BoardGameHub 1.0.0. So the thread is doing its job.

The poll stays open. It still decides what starts after Wordle.

 

[gatorco]

I would be interested in a proper "return to form" for incorporating some Flash games. I know it's a deprecated standard, but the Ruffle emulation system is fairly robust these days and has allowed this abandoned content to still run on modern platforms. A long, long time ago there were popular modifications for vBulletin, Invision Power Board, and phpBB that let users play games and submit their scores to the leaderboards.

There are a couple "arcade" plugins for XenForo right now, but none of them seem to really have out of the box support for Flash specifically. The main issue that I'm aware of is that XenForo uses a slightly-proprietary system that Flash's ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 just do not work with (because XenForo's standards simply did not exist at the time). As such, you can still sorta get Flash games to "work" with a leaderboard, but you have to cobble together a sort of intermediary PHP bridge file that accepts the username, score, and XenForo session data (plus optional things like a hash/salt to prevent cheating) on game over and then pipe that into the XenForo arcade plugin.

Tons of really great games were obsoleted, and a more user-friendly arcade system with the software to get them running again with minimal work on the administrators' side could be an interesting project. You could simply get your hands on these legacy packs of games in .SWF file format and change a line or two of code on your end to point it to this hypothetical new plugin's interface and let visitors play some classics that they haven't seen in 10+ years. Nostalgia has been big for a while!

(And, thinking more broadly here, you could even possibly hook this arcade plugin into your other offerings. If you're holding the #1 spot on the leaderboard when scores are cleared to start a new weekly/monthly/etc cycle? Your tally of total #1's is kept track of by XenJourney, or you can get a gift of bonus XP on the spot. If you have a lot of games you could cap those disbursements to not stack after the Nth one as to not let one user who's really good at the games destroy the forum economy.

 

[Gwendal]

Thanks for writing this up, gatorco, and for the detail on the bridge file. That is the part most arcade add-ons never solved: getting an old SWF to hand its score to the forum without the admin patching each game by hand.

Ruffle changes the picture, you are right. The emulation runs in the browser, so nothing needs a plugin, and the score call can be caught on the page instead of rewritten inside every game. What I do not know yet is how many of the classic game packs report their score in a way Ruffle exposes cleanly, and that decides whether this is a weekend of plumbing or a long tail of per-game fixes.

So it goes on the list as a candidate, with your name on it, and I will look at how the score hand-off behaves on a handful of real games before saying more. The tie-in you describe is the part I like most: a weekly top score that pays XP in Level, counts in Journey or drops a card in XenCard costs almost nothing once the scores exist, and your cap on stacked rewards is the right instinct.

If you have two or three games in mind that you would want on day one, name them here. They make better test cases than anything I would pick.

 

[gatorco]

What I do not know yet is how many of the classic game packs report their score in a way Ruffle exposes cleanly, and that decides whether this is a weekend of plumbing or a long tail of per-game fixes.

I do recall from having managed IPB/phpBB (etc) boards back in the day that your general "arcade" plugin would capture the final result from the game's "score" variable and simply read from that. For games that came from noteworthy sites that already had high score systems of their own (like ArmorGames or Miniclip) the score submission routine was pretty much already in place so doing a quick edit and pointing it to the forum arcade plugin was a relatively easy thing...

...though I will say that this would definitely be a XenForo plugin that's going to require a little bit of effort on the buyer to also get working, because no two Flash game designers used identical variables in their projects ("score" versus "points" etc). There's only going to be so much that your plugin would be able to offload from the webmaster, they'd ultimately still need to know what variable in each game is the "score" one and how to go about finding that information in order to provide it to the plugin.

I think in a best-case scenario you could provide a comprehensive guide with a sample "how to add score submission to a SWF game via JPEXS Flash Decompiler" and then standardize as much of the bridge file as possible that way even the lowest tech-savvy webmasters only need to edit (or add) a couple lines of ActionScript to the game before adding it to their site. In most cases it's just a matter of either finding and editing the existing submission script, or finding where the "game over" state of the game happens and then adding the score submission trigger to the frame immediately after it.

That's not as clean and "out of the box" as all of your other XenForo add-ons, but with how messy SWF development was back in the day it's just something that comes with the territory.

A potential pitfall I foresee would be players deciding to cheat at the games and intercept the score submission routine and inject a zillion points. This can be circumvented by creating a secret hash that gets sent along to the bridge file, but if a Flash game doesn't already have a hash call setup (such as ones that were borrowed from Miniclip) the webmaster would also probably need to include an ActionScript declaration in the first frame of the game file in order for that added layer of anti-cheat to work. (There might be an easier way to make a hash, or the bridge could have a validation routine built into it from the start - not sure about that, I just remember this particular solution being a common one back in the 2000's.)

If you have two or three games in mind that you would want on day one, name them here. They make better test cases than anything I would pick.

I would say you can't go wrong with something from Miniclip's golden era. "Smashing" comes to mind, which was a pretty decent Breakout clone. And I do recall it had a score submission routine already built into it. "Bubble Trouble" was a good take on Pang, and "Zed" was a solid platformer. (You'd probably also find them in legacy downloads of ipbArcade and whatnot too.) Neopets also had a litany of miniature Flash games all throughout their early site and all of them had score submission routines that would convert your score into Neopets points (or something like that). "Freaky Factory" and "Bumper Cars" are two popular ones that come to mind, I think.

Those two avenues would be good test cases because there's less "jank" to deal with since Miniclip and Neopets (Viacom, at the time) were two very well-off and experienced studios. Everything they produced ought to be available via the BlueMaxima Flashpoint archive.

 

[Gwendal]

That is the most useful post anyone has written in this thread, and it matches what I have found so far. Let me put numbers on the shape of the work, because your "how much effort lands on the buyer" question is exactly the one that decides whether I build this.

Four ways a game can hand over a score​

Ruffle changes where the score is caught, not whether the game produces one. In rising order of effort for the webmaster:

1. fscommand. The player raises it to the page, so the add-on hears it with no edit to the file at all. Plenty of arcade era games already end on one.
2. ExternalInterface. Same idea, same result, no edit, common in later AS2 and in AS3 games that were built for portals.
3. A submission the game already makes over HTTP. This is the Miniclip and Neopets case you describe. The interesting part with Ruffle is that the file is served from the board, so a game that posted to a relative path lands on our endpoint without anyone opening the SWF. An absolute address to a studio that no longer answers is the case that needs work, and that is where a page level interception sits on my list to test rather than to promise.
4. A variable with no call at all. Your "score" versus "points" case. Nothing outside the file can read it reliably, so this is the one that needs the two lines of ActionScript and the decompiler.

So the honest promise is not "no work". It is that the first three cases should need zero file edits, and the fourth gets a documented snippet. What I do not know yet is the split across a real pack, and that is the measurement I owe this thread before I commit.

Finding the hook without a decompiler​

Rather than only writing the guide, I would rather the add-on answer the question for the admin. The idea I like: an import screen where you drop the SWF, play it right there, and a panel lists everything the game did while you played. Every fscommand, every external call, every request it tried to make, with the values. You finish a game, you see "fscommand('submitscore', 4820)" appear the moment you die, you click it, and that is the hook mapped. No decompiler for the three easy cases, and a clear verdict of "this one needs a patch" for the fourth. The written guide then only has to cover that last case, with a copy and paste snippet for AS2 and for AS3.

On cheating​

You are right about the hash, and I want to be blunt about its ceiling: anything inside the SWF can be read out of the SWF by the same decompiler we are telling admins to use, so a secret in the file raises the bar but never carries trust. I would rather spend the effort server side, where it holds:

• a play session opened when the game starts, tied to the member, the game and the moment, single use, so a score without a session or with a replayed one is refused;
• a floor on elapsed time and a ceiling per game, both learned from real scores rather than guessed, so the zillion points never reaches the table;
• a queue above a threshold you set, staff able to void a score and to reset a table, and the member told when it happens.

The hash stays as an optional extra for the games that already carry one, which is cheap to support since the routine is already in the file.

Your test cases​

Noted, and they are good ones for the reason you give: the studios that could afford a proper submission routine are the ones whose files are consistent. I will measure the hand-off on a handful of them and come back with the split, how many needed nothing, how many needed the snippet, how many fought.

One line on the legal side so nobody is surprised later: the add-on would ship the engine, the import screen and the guide, never the games. Admins bring their own files, as they did with the old packs.

The tie-in you sketched is still the part I want most. Once a score exists and can be trusted, a weekly table that pays XP, counts towards a Journey step or drops a card is a small piece of work on top, with your cap on stacked rewards built in from the start.