Discord's system sucks as much as Discord itself. It's hard to read, it conveys no information, it says nothing about post quality, the only thing it reflects is if someone did an
@everyone or an admin made an announcement. It's worse than even reddit up/down votes, at least those reflect some gay community consensus.
It's probably worth piecing together something unique to KF, and tweaking it to emphasize the unique areas we discuss. To be honest the lack of the ubiquitous yellow face reacts is a big reason I like the site (the thinking react is good as a sole exception). Something like:
1) Have a base set of forum-wide standard reacts. This could be our current reacts, or a subset, like the first 10 that show up on hover. The likely candidates are the standard non-T&H, maybe without Dislike (or at least recolor it).
2) Add board-specific reacts, like you tried to do with XF2. Polisperging react in non-political boards, cow-specific emotes in cow-focused boards, maybe some flags for A&N, sparkly girly items for the Beauty Salon, and so on. Let threads in each board develop a micro-culture around their own reacts.
3) Switch the post's react tally to the old "Anime guy" display. The current abbreviated approach wouldn't work well with board-specific reacts. Showing them all would encourage using the board-specific ones.
4) T&H holders continue getting an extended base set to use across the entire site. Maybe they get 1-2 extra board-specific emotes, but that could be annoying to maintain and might fragment how they react everywhere. If you build the system to make it easy to add/remove new reacts, you can experiment with the correct amounts once it's live.
5) Sneed.