Vanilla Forums not so Vanilla

Rating: 9 out of 10

July 25, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using Vanilla Forums as a tool for a community for our customers. With Vanilla Forums it has allowed us to create a blog spot where our customers can engage each other and share information regarding our product, services, and customizations that are available.

The Vanilla Forum known as the Cireson Community has been implemented across all organizations.

The business problem that this address is access to information. With such a large customer base it is difficult to be aware of each situation our customers are using our product. With the advent of the community, this has given us a centralized point of access to share with everyone.

Pros

Gamifying - Vanilla forums have allowed us to institute a ranking system where users are rewarded for participation. With this feature, users can gain recognition and prizes.
Ease of use. Vanilla forums is very easy to use and manage.
Customer service from Vanilla forums is fast and responsive. Knowing that you can receive feedback on an issue is great.
Interaction between users. Supporting upwards of 1200 customers can be a difficult task. The community allows us to manage customer interaction and make the community aware of serious issues before they become a problem.

Cons

Copy and pasting would be a great improvement. To add picture to a forum post requires that you save the picture to a file and add it to the posting. This can be extremely time consuming.
The ability to discard a post before actually posting it. Right now if I start a post I have to post it, then delete it if I want it removed.

Likelihood to Recommend

For the purpose of what we are using it for, it's very suitable. [It has a]Nice UI, and a great technical team that helps with any issues, and the site has been running without issue.

This product is well suited for someone who wants a forum or blog community without too much effort on their part.

Merlenette Jones

Senior Technical Support Engineer in Information Technology at California Institute of Arts & Technology (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

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

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

July 21, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Professional in Social Media (Computer & Network Security company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

July 21, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

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).

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Professional in Social Media (Computer & Network Security company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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