WishList Member is a popular membership solution that lets you turn your WordPress site into a members’s only site.
Vanilla has recently created a WishList Members extension so that you can partially or completely restrict access to your Vanilla Forum.
The integration works by synchronizing the membership levels in WishList to the roles and permissions in Vanilla. Vanilla’s Roles and Permissions let you restrict a member’s functionality and content. For example, you can restrict access to specified categories or you can restrict members from being able to do things like post.
Here’s how to get it setup:
1 – To get started, you’ll need to setup single-sign-on between your Vanilla Forum and your WordPress site:
1.1 – Install the Vanilla Fourums plugin on your WorPress Site:
1.2 – Enable the jsConnect Plugin in Vanilla (In the Dashboard under Add-ons) and configure it using the information generated by the Vanilla WordPress plugin.
1.3 – Set the your forum’s registration to ‘Connect’ so that no one can register other than through your own registration system.
2 – The next step is to download the Vanilla Forums WishList Member Extension and copy it to the ‘extensions’ folder contained inside your ‘wishlist-member’ folder (contained within your WordPress plugins folder).
3 – In Vanilla under Roles and Permissions, create roles that correspond to the membership levels in WishList. For example if you have a membership level called GOLD, create a role in Vanilla called GOLD.
Each time a member accesses your forum using this integration, the members’s role will be synchronized and so if that member’s level has changed, the roles and permissions in Vanilla will be immediately updated.
We’ve been getting a lot of very positive feedback about the recent release of our Vanilla Comments feature. So far, the thing that people find most exciting about it is how it leverages all of the expense (time and money) already invested in gaining traction on their blog.
For most sites, the blog is the main destination for inbound/new users, and depending on the size & shape of the company behind that blog, they may have invested large amounts of money and/or time generating the content, outreach, and methodologies for getting new & repeat visitors. If the web property has a community platform for their users, typically none of those efforts are aimed at driving visitors to the community itself. Everything drives towards the central properly: the blog. The difficulty most sites have is: how can I get my visitors engaged on my community?
Sure, as illustrated above, there will naturally be some organic SEO that drives traffic to the community, and there will also be some inbound traffic from RSS & social bookmarks (assuming the forum platform has these features). But the remainder of the traffic comes from the blog itself. So, what drives that traffic?
If you’re really lucky, your forum platform gives you some method for putting widgets in the sidebar of your blog to show things like recent discussions, recently active users, recent activity, etc. But unless you’re a Vanilla forum owner, chances are you would have to custom code that, too. So what’s left? A link in the main menu? That’s it?
With Vanilla comments, every user who decides to leave a comment on your blog post is immediately a member of your community. They get all of the same notifications, badges, rewards, and other awesome engagement power that comes with Vanilla. When the first comment is added to a blog post using Vanilla Comments, a discussion is created in the forum. That discussion links back to the blog post, and all of the comments in the blog are mirrored in that discussion.
Since the Vanilla Comments release a few weeks ago, we’ve already seen blogs that didn’t even have a forum explode with instant community – their members saying things like:
“It really does look Amazing. Thanks 9to5, look forward to seeing where the Forums goes, and i like how the comments and forums are integrated! Keep up the good work!”
“This site is awesome! The best forum that I have ever seen in my entire life! It is so modern, good looking and more advanced than any other forums! Good job 9to5mac!”
“This is awesome. It well definitely keep people coming to the forums and will produce a lot of interesting discussions”
“Absolutely brilliant forum. It is so much easier to post and comment than any other forum I have used. Really looking forward to see how this forum progresses!”
We are incredibly happy with the reception of this feature, and based on the feedback we’ve received from forum owners and end-users, we’ve already got a second version primed for release that allows for more customization of Vanilla Comments.
Building a successful blog is a lot of hard work, and increasing your traffic is even harder because it requires that you constantly produce more content. You may have considered launching a community forum. A forum can be a great complement to a blog. It engages the readership by giving them somewhere to hang out and lets them build up a reputation. It’s also a great place to source ideas and additional content that can be repurposed as blog articles. Sounds great, yet you have some concerns about the time and effort to get a forum off the ground.
It’s true that forums have been around for a long time and some of the older software platforms that are still in use remind of the days of floppy disks and Windows™ 3.0. It’s also true that many forum software vendors haven’t taken notice of how the new social platforms have become really good at drawing people back in with constant notifications and real-time activity streams. While Twitter and Facebook provide users with constant gratification and are great platforms for broadcasting disparate bits of information, they haven’t been able to improve on the discussion forum format as a way for a group of people to have a coherent conversation. At Vanilla we are marrying the forum with modern usability and engagement techniques so that you get the best of both worlds. The fact is that new forum communities are being launched everyday and some of the successful ones have grown into large diversified media companies. Take Penny-Arcade.com for example.
Modern forum platforms like Vanilla are designed to make moderation and administration simple. Gamification and reputation are used to encourage positive behavior and keep abusive members from spoiling the mood. Gamification is using game mechanics to encourage desired behaviors – i.e. giving someone a reward for doing something that you want them to do. In forums, members are incented to do things like complete their profile, post comments, get ‘likes’ from others, etc.
The hardest part of launching a community is getting that critical mass of participants that will attract a large membership. You need content in the forum to attract participation but without participation, there is no content. They way to get around is to use your forum as your blog commenting system. Each article posted to the blog is mirrored in the forum and each commenter that registers to leave a comment will also be registered to the forum. Someone logging into the forum for the first time will see lots of threads and lots of comments and be more likely to stick around and create a new discussion. Since launching our commenting system we’re happy to see some of our customer being successful with this . A great example is www.9to5mac.com which very recently launched www.9to5forums.com seeded using Vanilla Comments.
This post describes how to integrate Vanilla’s new commenting system with your WordPress blog. Using Vanilla as a commenting system will better engage readers and help accelerate the growth of your community. When a blog article is published, a new discussion is created in the forum community and the comments on the blog post are mirrored in that thread in the community. Your readers can continue engaging each other in the community forum using the same registration, user profile and reputation capital.
1. If you had previously used the Vanilla Embed plugin, disable it by following the instructions posted here: http://vanillaforums.com/blog/converting-embed-plugin/
2. In your forum Dashboard, click on ‘Blog Comments’ and enable embedding.
3. Login to WordPress and under ‘Plugin’ select ‘Add New’ and search for ‘Vanilla Forums’. Install the plugin and activate it. A new menu item will be displayed on the menu bar called ‘Vanilla Forum.’
4. Under the ‘Vanilla Forum’ menu select ‘Setup’ and enter the URL of your forum, e.g. http://yourforum.vanillaforums.com
5. Under ‘Comment Integration’ check Replace your blog’s native commenting system with Vanilla comments and select the forum category where you would like comment discussions to appear. If you would like to direct comment discussions to different categories, you’ll have to modify the WordPress template and use the Vanilla Comments Universal Code instead of the WordPress plugin. This will require a bit of programming to map the WordPress category to the Vanilla category.
Today, we’re announcing our latest feature: Vanilla Comments. This feature will allow those of you who have a blog or news site to use Vanilla as a commenting system and really engage readers who might otherwise just enter a comment and leave. (Check out the comments on this article to see what it looks like).
Great communities start with great content, and you’ve already got that in your blog. If you have a blog and are thinking of launching a community forum, you can use your blog traffic and blog comments to quickly seed the community. If you already have a community forum, integrating comments will prolong the life of your editorial content and expose it to more people. In either case, you’ll end up with a more engaged audience and more traffic.
Why use Vanilla for blog comments?
- A single profile, reputation and user experience across the community and the comments
- Engage commenters with Vanilla’s existing gamification and curation features
- Use blog traffic to quickly seed community participation and vice versa
How does it work?
Embedding Vanilla Comments into your blog will insert a comment window at the bottom of each article:
If the reader is not already signed in, they will be prompted to do so:
The comments are displayed below the article and simultaneously, a new discussion thread is created in the community:
How do I implement comments?
There is a WordPress plugin available that allows you to enable comments on your WordPress blog from your WordPress dashboard. Alternately, we have a universal javascript code snippet that can be placed into any page to get comments enabled.
If you are using our Universal Code, the code snippet can be modified to create discussion threads in the appropriate forum category based on the blog post category.
Readers can log in using a Disqus ID, Twitter, Google, FaceBook or via single sign on.
What about my existing comments?
Vanilla is offering a comment importing service. Please contact us if you would like more information about this. In the future we hope to release tools to automate comment import.
We can also help you setup your blog so that existing comments remain in the old system and only new comments get created with Vanilla.
How much will it cost?
Comments will be available on all our paying plans which start at $49 per month.
How is Vanilla different from other commenting systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate?
Vanilla provides an integrated comment and forum community that will increase your readership engagement. We are good at understanding how to reward positive behaviour, get people to participate in a community and help the community drive moderation and curation. Vanilla now brings all that to your comments.
We don’t have all the features that stand alone commenting systems have but we are working on many that we see as important such as pre-moderation, integration into blogging software dashboards and automated imports of legacy comments.
Can I see some examples of Vanilla Comment implementations?
- 9to5 Mac , 9to5 Forums
- Cult of Mac.com
- Penny Arcade Report
Want to try it out? Sign up for a free trial.
I often get so buried in what I’m doing that I forget how important it is to explain why I’m doing it. Vanilla is a remarkable product that can do amazing things, and I could spend weeks upon weeks explaining all of the bells and whistles in detail, but it probably wouldn’t convince you that Vanilla is the product for you. Vanilla doesn’t exist because other forum platforms are bloated pieces of junk that are difficult to use and impossible to administer, it doesn’t exist because we believe in open source, it doesn’t exist because we love programming, and it doesn’t exist because we love intuitive and beautiful design. All of those things are true, but Vanilla exists for a different reason entirely.
Why did we make Vanilla?
I wrote the first line of Vanilla code because I needed a platform that empowered and fostered the culture of the community that I was running. As I developed it, I realized that the one consistency across all communities is that they are unique.
We see it every day at VanillaForums.com: Every community that joins our hosting platform is completely different from the previous. Everything from their design; to their feature wish-lists; to their verbage and slang is completely different. When a new community joins our platform, it is like discovering there is another new world of people with a culture uniquely their own that we never even knew existed. As a company we find this thrilling and awe-inspiring.
Vanilla today is able to achieve the idea I had so many years ago: not a one-size-fits-all community platform, but a community platform that engages with a multitude of cultures and peoples in ways that makes sense to them. We continue to build upon what we have with Vanilla in aid of that goal.
Why is it called “Vanilla”?
In order to build a platform that makes sense to a specific community, you’ve got to tear down all the walls and start from scratch with the “Vanilla” or “simple” version. Only once all the noise is out of the way can you start to put the pieces that make sense for that community back in place. So, you start with the “Vanilla” community, but end up with something much more – only you and your community will fully understand what that is, but luckily we’ve got a lot of experience helping people get there.
We have many, many ready-made options available for a community manager looking to engage his community the Vanilla way, but at VanillaForums.com my favourite clients are the ones who come in with lots of new ideas for their community and a fair budget for achieving them. In the last 3 months alone we’ve built out custom features for gamer communities, Apple enthusiast communities, hip hop communities, and even a Korean pop-culture community. Every one used Vanilla in totally different ways, and every one had completely custom features developed that surprise and excite their users in ways that drive engagement through the roof.
There isn’t a single person working at Vanilla who doesn’t understand and believe in this vision. We’ve all experienced it, and it truly feels like magic. It’s what makes working at a company like Vanilla so damn fun.
jsConnect uses javascript to allow cross-domain single-signon with another site. This is useful if you have members registered on your site and you don’t want them to have to re-register in Vanilla.
How does jsConnect work?
In order for jsConnect to work you’ll have to put some code on your site that identifies your users in a way that Vanilla can understand. Vanilla then requests this information when the user wants to sign in and synchronizes the user with Vanilla. In order to make this request for information Vanilla uses technology called jsonp. This allows us to send your cookies from your site to you and obtain login information.
This is the basic story of jsConnect, but it gets a bit more complicated than that in actual implementation because the information must be secured. We do this by sharing a secret key with your site and using it to sign requests so we know it comes from you.
Two Flavours of jsConnect SSO
There are two implementations of SSO that jsConnect supports. You can implement either of the methods or both as they serve different purposes.
Method 1: Site-Wide SSO
You implement site-wide SSO when Vanilla is as a full site. With this method you need to create a page that provides your login information in jsonp format.
Method 2: Embedded SSO
Vanilla also has the ability to be embedded in an html page either as an entire site or just as embedded comments. With this scenario you need to create a special SSO string that can be passed to the embedded Vanilla and provide login information.
WordPress Plugin
If your site is using WordPress then we make a plugin that allows you to use SSO with your WordPress site. It also helps you set up an embedded forum and embedded comments on your site. You can get the plugin here.
jsConnect Client Libraries
While writing the client code for jsConnect is pretty straightforward, it can be a little bit difficult to secure the connection. Because of this we provide client libraries for four of the more popular languages. If we provide a client library that you can use then we highly recommend using it.
All of these libraries are open source and maintained on github:
All of these libraries have one file with all of the library code you’ll need and one file that gives an example usage. They also have a readme that tells you which file is which. Please note that these libraries don’t yet support embedded SSO.
Manually Implementing jsConnect
If your site is programmed in a language that doesn’t have a client library then we provide documentation on our jsConnect protocol. Have a look at the jsConnect technical documentation part 1 and part 2.
Migrating from your current forum software (for example, Jive, VBulletin, Invision Board, etc.) to Vanilla is an exciting and wonderful thing. It’s important to realize how your community may react during this transition, because keeping your existing community active and happy is of the utmost importance.
Most users will be wary of change regardless of the obvious improvements. Change is scary and most users love to react, especially in a negative way. If you take the examples of Twitter or Facebook updates: nearly everyone instantly complains. But fast forward to 2 weeks later and it is water under the bridge. Here are a 6 ways to mitigate this temporary, yet often inevitable, user resistance:
1. Embrace the change.
If you want your users to accept change, you have to accept it first. When our clients choose to migrate to Vanilla, they feel excited, hopeful, even relieved. However, sometimes even the most enthusiastic client can have a difficult time letting go. They’ve grown accustomed to their previous platform’s design and work-flow and can be hesitant to embrace a more modern design or new features. Does this sound like you?
We understand. Change can be intimidating, even when you’re the one choosing to make the change! But remember: Vanilla looks and functions the way it does because we have spent years researching, brainstorming, designing and building in order to provide you and your users with the very best and most forward-thinking forum solution in existence. Trust our extensive knowledge and experience, and let us guide you through the set-up and design of your newly migrated community. Embrace the change! Your users and your community will only benefit as a result.
2. Keep your community in the loop.
Change is difficult for users, but a surprise change is even worse. Prepare your community well in advance of your plan to move to Vanilla and keep them in the loop as the launch date approaches. Open a thread on your current platform for any questions your community may have about the move. Share screenshots of particularly exciting, new Vanilla features with your moderators and community leaders, and let them be your voice for the other users. This will cut back on questions asked post launch, and it will generate excitement and make users feel involved, appreciated, and less likely to lash out.
3. Have a soft launch.
To ease the stress and scariness of a full-blown, instant launch, schedule a beta or soft launch. You don’t need to publicize this launch, or even have every feature or piece of artwork in place. But invite your moderators and administrators to test out the beta and get a feel for it well in advance of your launch. Have them submit any questions or concerns during the beta, when you (and Vanilla!) are better equipped to respond and make any changes, if necessary.
4. Confirm user info and settings.
This seems like a small detail that can be put aside until the last minute, but it often becomes a major hiccup when not dealt with proactively. Were you experiencing spam or trolls on your previous forum platform? Are there any users you would like to eliminate or re-set login info for? Are there new users you’d like to add or revisions you’d like to make for any Administrators? How are your users accustomed to logging in: via your own portal or via a social network? Send a list of any user preferences to Vanilla as soon as you can, as well as a list of any specific settings preferences you’d like us to configure.
5. Organize the feedback.
Amidst all the varying degrees of reactions you’ll witness during a migration, there will be some very useful user feedback. Assign a Moderator to handle all migration/new forum feedback and set up a special discussion thread where users can post their questions and concerns. Your users will appreciate this opportunity for being heard, and as a result, they’ll be less likely to react negatively or unproductively. In order to keep this thread from continuing indefinitely, do give it a deadline (for example, keep it open for the first two weeks after launch).
6. Educate your community.
You chose to migrate to Vanilla for many reasons, so share those reasons with your community! Educate them on all the new features you’ve just exposed them to. Highlight what’s new and improved on the Vanilla platform, and what plans you may have for the future. Yes, listen to their feedback, but respond to any user reactions by educating them on all the positive changes and new features now available.
In a recent blog post, we wrote about the threat that new, more engaging social media platforms pose to forums running on legacy forum software. While discussion forums remain the best format for people to come together and exchange ideas online, several new platforms are vying to replace traditional forum communities by focusing on better engagement and usability for end users.
To help communities make the switch to Vanilla Forums, we are now offering a free migration service to anyone signing up to our Enterprise plan. Our service includes migration of the database, basic customization of your theme, and perhaps most importantly: counsel on ensuring that the migration is a positive experience for community members and moderators.
Vanilla has done the migration of dozens of forums including vBulletin, phpBB, bbPress, Invision Power Board, Jive, Lithium and many more. No matter how old and outdated your forum software, there will always be a vocal minority of users who will be resistant to any kind of change. The best way to ease people’s fear of change is through a good communications campaign. For example:
- Announce the migration in advance
- Get moderators on board before announcing to the community at large
- Share with members the technical pains that your current software is causing which may not be apparent to members
- Highlight the new exciting features that will be available after migration
- Share details of the migration logistics with members, but only once the migration date and time is set in stone
After the forum migration, some best practices include:
- Create a temporary discussion or category where members can ask questions about the changes and new features
- Recruit a moderator or admin to become a subject matter expert and respond to migration related discussions
- Sink any unfairly negative discussions (or let the community use Reactions to decide if it’s fair or not.)
Migrating your forum can be a scary prospect, but when done right it becomes a positive experience for you and your community members.
Community management & moderation is a complex and nebulous subject with very few rock-solid principles to match the shape and size of every community. The constant battle that many community software developers face (and lose) is where to draw the line on feature development for community moderation & administration. I believe that many of the features that exist in most popular community software packages are actually detrimental to the health of a community, and can cause community uproar as data that has emotional attachments within the community is altered or removed.
At Vanilla, we understand this predicament and are constantly working to build soft features that effectively steer a community in the right direction, while giving moderators and administrators the power they need. A prime example of this methodology is a little-known but incredibly powerful feature we created called sinking.
When potentially explosive issues arise on a community, one of the common side effects is that a particular discussion thread will grow rapidly, filling with heated comments as angry community members spit venom at each other. Without the ability to deal with this type of issue quickly, it can often end in temporary or even permanent banning of members who were key in the instigation of the problem.
Most community software packages provide a “close discussion” option, which prevents members from adding new comments to the discussion. The problem that we found with this type of functionality was that it often made the key contributors to the heated debate even more angry, but instead of being angry at each other, they would turn on the moderators who had closed the thread. At this point the debate always went from whatever was angering them to a “freedom of speech” argument. The problem with a freedom of speech argument is that everyone in the world has an opinion on freedom of speech: they are all for it.
So, now the entire community is angry at the moderators for effectively gagging the debaters. The moderators start to feel the pressure, complain to administrators, administrators complain to the site owner, and now all of upper management is involved in a problem that could have just gone away if the software had the proper tools in place.
That tool is Vanilla’s Sink Discussion. One of the communities that I managed in the past had more of these heated discussions than I care to reveal. The subject matter of that particular community was one that simply often led to heated debate, and I found that I was constantly being pulled out of my work duties to deal with these arguments on this community. I realized that one of the side effects of the way community software is designed is that heated arguments always sit at the top of the discussion list because the comments are being added to it so quickly that it essentially stays “sticky”.
This means that every single member and every single guest visitor is going to read that discussion, and a large portion of those folks are going to want to get involved – which simply fuels the fire. My answer was to force the discussion to sink down the list naturally by changing that particular discussion to no longer update it’s “Date of Last Comment” field as new comments are added. So, from the point that you “sink” a discussion, it essentially allows comments in other discussion threads to bump their discussions above the one that has been sunk.
New comments can still be freely added to the sunk discussion, but it no longer bumps up to the top of the discussion list with each new comment. This means that there is no more extra fuel being added to the fire, and the other discussions in the forum begin to douse the flames by taking first-order precedence in the discussion list. Without new people sharing their 2 cents on one side or the other of the heated debate, it always degrades into the core instigators shouting back and forth at each other, and eventually when one or the other side inevitably goes to bed, the argument is over and the rest of the community is non-the-wiser.
I know what you’re thinking: “Don’t the people involved in the debate notice that the discussion has been sunk? Don’t they get mad at the moderators?”
No. In our experience, we found that the people inside the sunk discussion never notice that a discussion has been sunk. Never.
With discussion sinking implemented on my community back in 2001, arguments were quickly and effectively diffused. Administrators were no longer pulled in to handle touchy situations, and upper management never even heard about the problems – because there weren’t any.
I was so surprised and pleased by the effectiveness of discussion sinking that I made it a core feature of Vanilla when it was released in 2005, and it is still a core feature of Vanilla today.
