Quora headquartered in Mountain View, California now offers Blogs on Quora to replace their previous Board system, providing site users with a blogging platform.
N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 5.5 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
Quora Blogs is well suited to reach your ideal customer set and the interaction is lot more social than many other platforms. There are no bounds for expressing one's thoughts and ideas. A well directed communication is made and conversations are top notch. What I feel is that there should be a good enough reach for more customers.
For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.
Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.
There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.
Quora has an amazing community that gives you the support you need if you are actively contributing in a helpful way. Content is short and concise and gets right to the matter at hand. My team has found it useful in showing up as an expert in our industry by answering the questions that are being asked out there.
In comparison to Blogger, Quora Blogs has its perks. However, I think for any serious blogging I would find myself going elsewhere just for the added features that seem to be missing from Quora such as widgets and advanced customization
From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or InVision, and it outdoes Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.
Previously, I never read blogs and I would just try to search here or there on google/the internet for things I was interested in, but now [with Quora] I can find everything in one place.
For example, I once searched about the computer languages and their usages and one blog post really sorted out my confusion as it was completely detailed.
