is Vanilla suitable for business use?

Sandro

We are considering moving from phpBB to Vanilla for our company private message board (just setup a trial account).
I'm excited with the possibility of direct interaction with the developers, as well as impressed with the attentive customer care I've seen in this forum.

In the other hand, after reading all these posts, my impression is that Vanilla is too buggy for a corporate environment. I understand some downtime or missing features temporarily due an upgrade gone wrong, but info leaking to Google?!? Search results ignoring category privileges?!? That could be devastating to our (any?) business!!!

More worrisome was the answer "We've found the issue and will correct it by tomorrow." Wow, I get different pricing for different levels of customer support, but secret information on Google should mean "darling, don't wait for me tonight, the whole team have some code to fix, even the CEO will be here overnight" - regardless of the customer plan.

So I wonder if Vanilla is suitable for us, or it's a tool focused on public communities where data security is not that critical. I appreciate any input from Vanilla team, but especially from fellow customers.

TIA

James_Puckett

If you really want your corporate message board to stay private, don’t trust the software alone. Run your own server on your private network and make your users access it via a VPN.

Lincoln

Hi @Sandro, if you read the rest of that Google-related discussion you'll see that, not only did we follow up immediately, but we found the issue was non-existant anyway. I'm not sure how we could resolve a bug that doesn't exist any faster. :)

The brief lapse in search permissions was indeed a serious problem that we fixed and deployed within hours of it being reported. We've adjusted our internal release cycles to make sure new bugs like that aren't introduced into our live servers.

We have many customers who use Vanilla for corporate communication. Many of them use our "Private Community" setting which bars anyone from seeing any data on the site unless they are logged in.

PhotoMerchant

Nice response Lincoln.

Sandro

At some point, BEFORE it became clear that it was a non-issue, "will fix tomorrow" was an answer deemed acceptable by the team during a major crisis. That's my concern.

Anyway, I'm still testing and didn't rule out Vanilla. Just the opportunity to have this kind of interaction we are having here with the developers is a major plus IMO.

Lincoln

@Sandro No, it was our system administrator jumping in to make sure the client knew they were heard until the rest of the team could have a look, and setting a minimum deadline for resolution. It was an appropriate response for that client at that moment. I don't see how it's possible to look at that discussion and draw negative conclusions about our entire support strategy.