XenStaff gives your team a page of flip cards: who they are, when they are around, how to reach them. Version 2.1 looked the part, but behind the cards the contact form had no captcha, the inbox could only be marked as replied, the career timeline had no screen at all and the roster scanned every member on each page. Version 3.0.0 rebuilds the add-on on XenForo itself, fixes all of that at the root and keeps every 2.1 feature. It is still free.
XenStaff on the store, free, with the full list of changes in the version history.
A team page worth opening
- Your staff groups in the order you pick from a list, tabs to filter by role, a top staff member once someone has actually been thanked, and a sidebar with who is online, who is on duty now, the most thanked and who to contact.
- The flip cards stay, now with a real Details button that works with the keyboard and fades instead of turning when reduced motion is on. The back holds stats, quote, bio, office hours, social links, contact and thanks.
- Office hours are shown in the visitor's time zone, with slots past midnight on the right day and a full day reading "All day".
Messages that get an answer
- Members and guests write to a staff member from the card, in an overlay. Guests pass a captcha, new accounts go through XenForo's spam check, and guests can leave an email address if they want an answer.
- The message lands in the staff member's account area, in an inbox with Open, Replied and Closed tabs, pages and an open count in the account menu. On the forum, only that staff member can open it; admins have a contact log.
- Reply from the message itself: one click sends your answer as a direct message with their message quoted, or by email to a guest who left an address. Reply times are now measured for real.
- Contact alerts read "Someone sent you a message" for anonymous senders instead of showing a grey question mark, link to the message and can be switched off in alert preferences.
Everywhere on your forum
- A Staff tab on member profiles with bio, office hours, career timeline, social links and thanks.
- The staff badge under the user title in messages and in the member tooltip, read from a cache: a long thread costs no extra query.
- The career timeline finally has screens: joined, promoted, paused, returned, milestones and your own events, edited by the staff member or by you. Years of service count from the day they joined the team.
- Thanks send an alert to the staff member (once a day at most from the same member), a second click takes them back, and Most thanked staff joins Notable members.
Fixed at the root
- Presence respects privacy: a staff member who hides their online status is no longer shown online, nor counted in "Online now".
- The 30-day thanks chart counts days in the visitor's time zone, so nothing lands on the wrong day.
- The roster comes from XenForo's indexed group table and is cached, instead of a scan of every member per staff group on each page that shows the widget.
- Deleted and merged members are cleaned up, and the stylesheet went from 43 KB to 13 KB.
For the people running it
- A staff overview in the Admin CP: every staff member by group with their badge, thanks, open messages, reply time and status.
- A sheet for each staff member: badge, status, contact settings, office hours, timeline, and the thanks they received, with removal of an abusive one.
- A contact log with filters, native badge pages, statistics, a Rebuild staff counters tool, an admin permission and a read-only REST API.
Upgrading
Download 3.0.0 from your account, back up, then install the archive over 1.x or 2.x from the Admin CP. Profiles, thanks, hours, messages, badges and your permissions are kept, and old addresses redirect to the new pages. One thing can look different: thanks counters are recounted from the thanks actually stored, so a counter that had drifted in 2.x can go down. If the upgrade stops on an error, your data is safe: wait two minutes (some hosts keep PHP files in memory) and click Upgrade again.XenStaff on the store, free, with the full list of changes in the version history.
