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Vanilla Forums Blog » Introducing Vanilla Reactions and Badges
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Vanilla Forums Blog » Introducing Vanilla Reactions and Badges
A successful community is an engaging and welcoming place where people can build new connections and discover new things. Vanilla Badges and Reactions are at the foundation or our member-driven reputation and recommendation engine, which helps you build an engaged and positive community.
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Comments
Is it only for paid plans-?
This closed encapsulation is not accepted from a company which supported SOPA and loves FOSS.
1) There is a general misconception about how we host our forums. We don't have just one server, or even one server per customer. We have clusters of servers all working create to deliver a highly available, highly scalable and very resilient platform. There are dedicated loadbalancers handling traffic that is split between 10+ webservers. These webservers interact with several memory caches to increase speed and reduce the load to several database servers. There are very few self hosted customers for which that is a technological downgrade.
2) We design some addons specifically for our hosted platform. There is no way to say this any differently: some things are custom built for vanillaforums.com. There are a few reasons why this is the case, but here are the most important ones:
a) We know exactly how our hosting infrastructure is built, what kind of resources are available, how it will handle various types of load and traffic. We can build cron jobs, rely on having access to fast memory caches, etc. There are some features, some very complex features, that simply would not work on a GoDaddy shared hosting account, or even on an ordinary single dedicated server.
b) We are a business. Vanilla Forums Inc is a company that is trying to make money and grow. We provide our product as open source because we can, and because we want to make the code available to people that would not be our customers anyway. Go nuts with it, learn from it, modify it and take it in a new direction! That's the goal. However, if we tried to build our business around releasing addons open source and trying to charge $20 here, $50 there, we would get nowhere, and the company would simply go under. This isn't theory, this is a fact. You may (like so many before you) ask that we "just release it how it is". No. What happens then is that we end up with tons of support requests (from people who aren't paying for our time) asking why XYZ doesn't work on their new addon. This is not something we enjoy.
The compromise that the community has to make in order to receive Vanilla Forums Core as open source is the understanding and acceptance of the fact that we need to prioritize making money in order to survive. This will manifest in several ways, one of which is addons being restricted to vanillaforums.com only, or being slower to come out as downloadable.
You could sell the download addons and sell support for the addons, win win for all.