Instead of having your new forum’s url look like this: joesforum.vanillaforums.com, it can look like this: joesforum.com or forum.joeswebsite.com It’s a simple, two-step process that we recommend for all new forum owners. (Please note that you must purchase or create your desired url from a domain registrar before customizing your Vanilla Forums domain.)

1. Log in to the domain name registrar where your domain is hosted (ex. GoDaddy, Rackspace, etc.)
2. In your Admin control panel, create a DNS record for your domain so that it points at our servers. You have two choices here:
   • If you want to use a subdomain (forum.joeswebsite.com) create a CName record for your domain that points to your Vanilla address: joesforum.vanillaforums.com
   • If you want to use a top level domain (joesforum.com) create an A Record for your domain, using your forum’s IP address.
3. Back in your Vanilla Dashboard, you’ll notice a Custom Domain menu under the Appearance category. You can alternatively follow directions for setting up your custom domain here. Or, if you’ve already followed instructions to configure your custom domain, you can confirm that it’s configured properly here.

To look up your forum’s IP address:

1. Visit http://network-tools.com/
2. Choose “Lookup” from the list of radio buttons
3. Enter your forum name (joesforum.vanillaforums.com) in the long box, select “Go”
4. Look further down the page, it will list your IP address

Vanilla offers different options for how users can view your forum. Here, you can select from “Discussions,” “Categories,” or “Activity” layout options.

1. Select “Homepage,” under Appearance.
2. Select the page you want your users to see as soon as they visit your forum (Tip: all Discussions is the most popular.) Click “Save.”
3. Select Your Theme.

Your forum’s theme is like its wallpaper. A nice theme makes your forum more inviting and memorable , so it’s important to select one right from the get-go.

1. Select “Themes,” under Appearance.
2. Choose your theme. You can “Preview” a theme before clicking “Apply.”

Don’t see any themes you like? You can customize a theme (or create your own) by editing the html/css. Click “Customize Theme” under the Appearance category, or contact sales@vanillaforums.com if you’d like Team Vanilla to create a custom theme for you.

Should you ever need help with Vanilla or with setting up your community, please visit our support forum: http://vanillaforums.com/help or email support@vanillaforums.com.

A private community will only be visible to registered members. Anyone visiting the site URL will only see the login page.

To make your community private, enable the Private Community plugin in the Addons and then set the community to private under Users>Roles and Permissions

Yes. When you create a new category, check the option 'This category has permissions'. This will let you grant access and permissions to the category.

The key to creating a successful online community is attracting visitors, turning visitors into registered members and then leveraging the community to attract even more members.

1. Getting traffic to your community forum

- Recruit the first members. Reach out to your colleagues and family members to get those first few discussions and comments posted. Announce your new community to your email list, blog about it often, and post the link everywhere possible.

- Use Vanilla as your blog commenting system. Vanilla can replace the comment system on your blog. This helps quickly create content in the forum and turns ‘drive by commenters’ into engaged community members.

- Make sure search engines can find you. Edit the forum’s homepage title and description (under Appearance > Banner in the Dashboard), submit the forum URL to search engines and add it to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

2. Engage visitors

- Seed the forum with content. Don’t create ‘sock puppet’ accounts (fake accounts). Rather get friends, colleagues and co-conspirators to create some discussions. Create discussion that are open ended questions and invite response.

- Monitor the forum. Create a timetable so that someone is always checking the forum and can quickly respond to posts from new members.

- Make is easy to register. Enable the Facebook, Twitter and Google Connect Addons to make registration simple.

- Turn on Badges and Reaction. Badges are a great way to get new members coming back. Some of the badges are targeted to new members such as the Photogenic badge given to members who upload a profile image and the First Post badge. You can also upload our own badges that can be handed out by moderators.

- Share ‘how to’ tips with new members. For example, show them how to mention someone by typing in @username and update their notification settings so that they get an email when something of interest happens.

3. Create a virtuous cycle

- Let users share. Enable the ‘Liked’ or “Share This’ Addons so that users can share what they like to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

- Use that user generated content. Highlight interesting discussions on your website home page on in a weekly blog post.

- WordPress Widgets. I you have a WordPress site, use our plugin to display widgets on your website such as ‘recent discussions’ or ‘recent active users’.

Vanilla does not require additional SEO plugins or add-ons. The pages have been designed with SEO in mind.

Google considers content on a sub-domain as part of the main site. Having a forum on a sub-domain is as SEO friendly as having it in a folder. However, when using a custom sub-domain, we recommend adding the sub-domain to your Google Webmster Tools account.

Vanilla's URLs are formed as
domain/discussion/#ID/discussion-title

We have a plugin that can format URLs as:
domain/category-name/#ID-discussion-title.html

Yes. Google Analytics is a great complement to Vanilla's existing stats.

Simply send your Google Analytics ID to customer support and we will add it to every page of your forum.

Yes. Vanilla's UI can be localized. We currently support most major languages.

Vanilla also supports right-to-left language localization.

Some of our locales have been created using professional translation services but for the most part, our locales have been created and are maintained by our Open Source community.

If you would like to contribute to Vanilla's localization, you can register at Transifex and join a translation team:
https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/vanilla/

Yes. We can migrate almost every legacy forum to Vanilla. We can usually import all data including passwords, uploaded media, private conversations, permissions. etc.

Migration is done as a service and is often included in our larger plans. Please contact sales for more information.

In most cases, we can cleanse your existing forum of SPAM and can prevent further damage from being done. Vanilla uses a combination of automated and member-driven functionality to keep your forum free of SPAM and abuse.

Vanilla's hosted solution is very secure. Further, since Vanilla's hosted product is based on an open source product, its code has been scrutinized by thousands of developers.

To migrate your self-hosted forum, you can use the Vanilla Porter to export the data. It can then be imported

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/porter-core

If you run into any difficulty, please contact customer support. We can help complete the import.

Vanilla has many moderations features, including ways for the community to self-moderate using Reactions. A summary of Vanilla's moderation capabilities can be found here:

http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/moderating-your-vanilla-community/

We have a URL plugin that allows you to change the default URL structure from

domain/discussion/#ID/discussion-title

to

domain/category-name/#ID-discussion-title.html

Vanilla offers three plans, Small Group, Advanced and Enterprise. Our plans are based on the number of page-views that your forum gets each month and have more features.

The plans are described at www.vanillaforums.com/plans

The addons for each plan can be found here: www.vanillaforums.com/info/plugins

Log into your forum's Dashboard and then click on the green 'My Account' button in the top right corner. On the account page, you will see a button in the right column labelled 'Click here to update your credit card information'.

Log into your forum's Dashboard and then click on the green 'My Account' button in the top right corner. On the account page, click on 'Billing History'. From there you can view, download or email each invoice.

Yes, you can upgrade and downgrade your plan during the trial period. Changing the plan will not extend the trial period.

Log into your forum's Dashboard and then click on the green 'My Account' button in the top right corner. On the account page, click on 'manage' and select the new plan.

To allow your members to register using their Facebook, Twitter or Google ID, follow the instructions here:
http://vanillaforums.com/blog/help/how-to-add-facebook-twitter-google-and-openid-to-your-community/

Yes, Vanilla has a single-sign-on plugin that can be used to automatically register and sign in members to the forum. Our SSO can do the following:

• On first login, import profile information including a profile picture
• Update profile information on each sign in
• Redirect users to your site's login page if they perform an action that requires a user to be logged in
• SSO to a Vanilla Forum on its own domain/sub-domain or that is embedded into a page on your site

The SSO documentation and libraries can be found here: http://vanillaforums.com/blog/help/implementing-jsconnect-single-signon-on/

If you want to implement SSO from a WordPress site, please install our WordPress plugin on your WordPress site:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vanilla-forums/

If you have paid WordPress site that uses WishListMember, you can install our WishListMember extension:
http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/using-wishlist-member-to-set-permissions-in-a-vanilla-forum/

Vanilla integrates with WordPress to achieve the following:

• Allow users to register and login to the forum via single-sign-on
• Replace WordPress' comments with Vanilla Comments
• Place widgets on your WordPress site that display forum content

Integration is made simple using a plugin which can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vanilla-forums/

More information on using Vanilla comments with WordPress can be found here:
http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/how-to-use-the-vanilla-commenting-system-with-wordpress/

Vanilla can replace the commenting system in your blog. If you are using WordPress as a blogging platform, follow these instructions: http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/how-to-use-the-vanilla-commenting-system-with-wordpress/

If you are using different blog software, you will need to edit the blog template and replace the existing blog comments with the code that can be found in the Dashboard under Forum>Blog Comments

When Vanilla creates a discussion thread based on a blog article, it will grab the blog title, the first few lines of the blog text and an image. You can use Open Graph meta tags to specify what image should be used. Otherwise, it grabs the first 4 images on the page and finds the "best" one it can - i.e. the biggest image that is at least 100x100, but smaller than 800px wide and not banner-shaped.

Vanilla currently has a read-only API. The documentation can be found here:

https://vanillaforums.com/blog/api/
http://vanillaforums.org/docs/api

Yes. A plugin called VanillaPop is available on some of the subscription plans.

VanillaPop lets you create a discussion or comment on an existing discussion via email.

Yes, in the Dashboard > Appearance > Customize theme, delete the following line from the HTML

     <a href="{vanillaurl}" class="PoweredByVanilla">Powered by Vanilla</a>

Yes and no. You can use Vanilla's open source product to develop your theme (CSS and HTML) modifications but any plugins or changes to product functionality cannot be ported to the hosted product. If you need custom functionality or would like to learn about the co-development programs for VIP plan subscribers, please contact sales.

Vanilla's open source product shares the much of the same code as our hosted product but has been modified to run on our proprietary purpose built infrastructure that makes Vanilla fast, redundant and scalable. Here's a blog article about our infrastructure: http://vanillaforums.com/blog/developers/whats-so-great-about-hosted-vanilla/

The hosted version also has additional features that take advantage of the infrastructure, for example images are stored on a CDN. Some additional features that you'll find on the hosted product include:

- Reputation (Badges and Reactions)
- Polls
- Ranks
- Best of page
- Q&A discussions
- Social integration

To embed a forum into an existing page, enable embedding and retrieve the code, go to 'Embed Forum' in the Forum menu in the Dashboard.

In most cases we recommend putting your forum on a sub-domain of your website instead of embedding. If you are concerned with optimizing SEO for an embedded forum, we still recommend having the forum on a sub-domain of your website and registering that sub-domain in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Yes. You can upload new badges in your Dashboard. Badge icons should be 100 x 100 pixels.

Currently, custom badge can only be awarded manually by moderators and administrators.

Our professional services team can create custom rules to award custom badges based on conditions.

Currently, this can only be done through a service engagement. Please contact sales to get more information.

Yes. Using Vanilla's Simple API you can:

- Retrieve a user’s current badge list
- Give a user a badge
- Retrieve a list of available badges

Documentation can be found here:

http://vanillaforums.com/blog/api/

Forums that are on a sub-domain of vanillaforums.com support SSL.

Forums on a custom subdomain such as yourdomain.com or community.yourdomain.com support SSL. However, an extra charge applies for Advanced and Small Group customers. You will also have to purchase an SSL certificate.

Yes, forum data is backed up daily. The risk of data loss requiring us to restore your forum from a backup is very low as there is redundancy throughout our system and our servers are in a top tier hosting facility.

Yes. We can provide you with a database dump of your data. Please contact customer support to get a dump.

We try very hard to respond within a few hours, and resolve within the same day. However, at times when the support volume is unusually high, we guarantee a response within 24 hours.

Yes! We've compiled some FAQs to help you find what you're looking for before you even need to ask, and we're constantly adding new information to them. If you can't find what you need in our FAQs, feel free to post about it.

Yes. It can be found at http://status.vanillaforums.com/

You can also follow Vanilla's operations team on Twitter at @vanillaops