Vanilla Forums are anything but Vanilla
July 27, 2017
Vanilla Forums are anything but Vanilla
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vanilla Forums
Our company uses Vanilla as our primary community platform for several of our games. Users can find like minded players, gameplay tips and tricks, and troubleshooting assistance.
- They provide excellent and timely assistance when setting up and configuring a community.
- Their team is very helpful, friendly, and professional.
- The platform itself is robust and is reasonably performant. it includes gamification features to encourage community participation.
- Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.
- Our previous community forums were built on vBulletin and were self hosted. They required regular security updates and multiple web servers. By switching to a cloud hosted Vanilla instance, we were able to save money on web servers and freed up valuable IT resources for other projects.
- vBulletin and phpbb