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Vanilla Forums - Best For Small Communities, Ill-Equipped For Large Ones
Updated July 24, 2017

Vanilla Forums - Best For Small Communities, Ill-Equipped For Large Ones

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vanilla Forums

Vanilla is being used by the whole organization as an external-facing communication and discussion medium for our end-users. Customers use the forum to discuss the product, report bugs, and interact with our development team in an informal setting. The forum is also used to make announcements and provide news about the product.
  • Vanilla has an easy setup and administration interface. The GUI is easy to use and features drag and drop functionality for some items like category rearrangement.
  • Vanilla has both on-prem and cloud hosting options, and provides a dedicated CSR with development resources. Customizations are possible such as styling, banners, and look and feel tweaks to default visual wrappers.
  • Vanilla has a decent add-on collection, including antispam, warning system, swear word filter, and more.
  • Vanilla's service as it relates to cloud hosting could use some improvement. Communication tends to fall off and is sometimes not as prompt as it could be. CSR to development team interaction and access needs to be more transparent as customers are not typically given direct access to a technical resource that might understand software issues better.
  • Some of Vanilla's functionality leaves a lot to be desired, especially as it relates to larger or different types of communities. Some features were clearly not built with worst-case scenario abuse in mind, such as the ability for users to React to posts with clickable buttons (or even to hide posts they feel are Spam or Trolling, easily exploitable by disgruntled users), or the inability to have a limit on how far users can quote or tag one another (resulting in long, unwieldy chains of conversation), or the spam filter's tendency to have a high number of false positives and inability to deal with foreign language spam. Even basic post searching is devoid of any meaningful advanced algorithm, leading to a lot of results that are irrelevant or just not intuitive to end users.
  • These are just some of the things Vanilla is ill-equipped to deal with for communities of larger size.
  • Vanilla's development team needs to be more responsive and understanding of concerns and criticism regarding software features on their platform. Inadequacies pointed out in the way their software works are often met with an inaccurate passing of the buck towards customers ("teaching users not to abuse the Spam or Troll buttons is a Community Management issue") or with delayed promises of fixes (more robust signature filtering and control is just one example). The software has clear flaws and inabilities to deal with certain abuse scenarios from end-users that it needs to be able to address and not just pass off to customers to better manage communities. Software features need to be better developed with these worst-case scenarios in mind.
  • Delivery of some product features or layouts needs to improve. In some cases, asked-for designs have been lacking basic features (such as obvious buttons or features for ease of use) or have outright been delivered as broken (improper floating of graphical assets leading to distortion of the layout, bad sizing on fonts, words, or other text-based elements, or errors for certain testing scenarios for posting).
  • Some features unique to the platform such as the use of Reactions or the ability to select Avatars have been of benefit to the community. Dev Tracking and the ability to tag users has created a nice organic feel to the community that has resulted in some positive impact.
  • Technical issues and design flaws in the software or layout have had a negative impact in that users feel that basic forum functionality is not present or not operating at an ideal level.
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.
Vanilla is best suited to small, intimate communities that have the ability to police themselves effectively and which have the luxury of being able to not have to deal with the critical mass of larger communities on the internet. The feature set is well-suited to informal non-professional settings for small to medium communities. However it is ill-suited to dealing with enterprise level or business environments, or with communities with hundreds of thousands of members where abuse is more easily rampant. The only way it has been feasible at that level is to gut the product features or simplify layout or design so that it can't be used with ill intent by troublemaking users, which sort of defeats the purpose of using the platform.

Combined with the less-than-stellar customer service and communication, this makes a recommendation not likely from my perspective.