Best Of

Every community has a handful of members who consistently step up by answering questions, sharing knowledge, welcoming newcomers, and modeling the behaviors you want others to follow. A powerful way to strengthen your community is to formally recognize these standout contributors as leaders.

❓️Why this matters

Elevating helpful members isn’t just a nice gesture, it’s a strategic move that improves the community for everyone. Bringing your most active, excited, and knowledgeable members into a community leadership program will:

• Recognize, reward, and encourage their contributions: Active members often put in significant time engaging with others, researching answers, or identifying resources to share. Recognition shows you notice and value their effort, and will encourage them to continue to engage, help, and support others.
  
• Create consistent peer-to-peer support: The majority of the peer answers and user-generated content will come from a small number of members in your community. Recognizing them and engaging with them directly will help to keep the answers in your community coming consistently.
  
• Reinforce positive norms and behaviors: Recognized leaders naturally influence culture by demonstrating how to participate effectively. These members can also remind others of the rules of engagement or your code of conduct when needed.
  
• Inspire others: Public recognition signals that leadership is accessible, motivating more members to contribute. You want to make these leaders highly visible, as something other members can aspire to. Note: It’s also important to rotate or add a few new members on a regular basis (quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly) to both have fresh voices in leadership and to help other members feel like it’s something they will have an opportunity to be part of if they want to.
  
• Augment your team: Most community teams are small; empowering end-users who can help to keep an eye on things in the community, remind users of the rules of engagement, or alert community managers to spam attacks or bad actors can be critical in effectively managing your community as it grows.

➡️ How to do it

• Create a lightweight “Community Leaders” or “Champions” program with clear criteria: helpfulness, accuracy, friendliness, consistency.
  
• Use visible markers, such as badges, titles, or profile highlights, so other members know who these leaders are.
  
• Connect with this group on a regular basis via consistent meetings, a private discussion group, or whatever works best for them. Find out what they think is working well in the community – and what isn’t – so that you can improve things with their insight.
  
• Invite leaders into occasional feedback loops or early-access discussions. Offer “Town Hall” type meetings and share what’s coming for the community or anything going on at your organization or with their product that they are interested in. These activities become the benefits of participating, give them helpful context and information to bring into their responses to other users, and create a sense of ownership and loyalty.
  
• Celebrate them publicly in posts or newsletters. Spotlight a leader, share why they were chosen, and offer a genuine thank-you. Take these recognitions beyond the community – feature them in social media, at events, or wherever makes sense for your organization.

💥 The takeaway

Recognizing your most active and helpful members as leaders transforms them from participants into partners. It builds trust, distributes expertise, and fosters a culture where members support each other, strengthening your community from the inside out.

Hello,

We're revamping the metrics we report on for the new year and I was wondering if anyone has figured out a good way of mapping time to value on the community? I'm thinking "time to first meaningful interaction" could be good to track but the problem is we have a lot of people who log on to view content but don't post themselves and I don't know if that really captures the value they get out of the space… We post a lot of informational content and I do think that the "lurkers" are getting value out of it, I'm just not sure how to reflect that. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

The holiday season is your time to recharge—but your community shouldn’t go quiet just because you’re out of office! With Scheduled Posts and Automation Rules in Vanilla, you can keep the conversation flowing and critical tasks handled automatically. Here’s how to set it up so you enjoy your break with peace of mind. 🌟

🗓️ 1. Plan Ahead with Scheduled Posts

Write up a series of posts, questions, ideas, or articles before you leave and schedule them to publish while you’re away.

🔹 Why this helps:
Scheduled posts keep fresh content in your community—even when you’re offline—which encourages ongoing engagement.
🔹 How it works:
While you’re creating your content, use the Schedule option to pick a future date and time for publishing. You can schedule events, discussions, questions, or articles weeks in advance.

💡 Pro tip: Create a mix of evergreen tips, discussion prompts, or community highlights that resonate even without immediate moderation.

🤖 2. Set Up Automation Rules to Manage Tasks

Automation Rules can act like virtual helpers—automatically performing tasks based on triggers you define.

🔹 Escalate posts to support:
If a community member posts something that needs support attention, configure an Automation Rule to escalate it (e.g., to Zendesk, Freshdesk or another ticketing system). This ensures your support team doesn’t miss urgent issues while you’re away.

🔹 Handle flagged or inactive content:
Create rules to bump posts with no activity, add tags, or even escalate content that receives a set number of reports. This keeps content moving without manual oversight.

💡 Pro tip: Name your rules descriptively (“Holiday Escalations,” “Unanswered Questions Escalate”) so they’re easy to manage later.

🧠 Bonus Tips for a Smoother Holiday

✨ Run a final check: Before you leave, make sure all scheduled posts are set with the correct times and categories.
✨ Preview your Automation Rules: Run them once manually to ensure they behave as you expect.
✨ Let your community know: Consider publishing a friendly post letting members know you’ll be out but the community is still active—and give them tips on how to get quick help.

Enjoy your holidays—and let Vanilla do what it does best while you take a well-deserved break! 🎉

I'd like to learn more about this also! Thank you for asking.

That's definitely do-able. I think creating an analytics dashboard is probably the best way to accomplish this (mostly for the ability to export the report as a CSV).

The way I set this up on my test instance was setting the Data Source to 'QNA' and Group By to 'Post Title.'

That should give you a very general breakdown of all posts happening on your site.

For the filters, I set these two:

Type NOT EQUAL to answer_accepted

and

First Comment? EQUAL to true

The first filter should show us all posts that don't have a status of 'Accepted Answer.' The second filter is optional, but including it will filter out questions that don't have any comments/answers at all yet. What we're left with (because we're using the QnA data source) are questions that do not have an accepted status yet and have at least one comment.

Edit (Dec 18, 6pm) - Going to leave my mistake up there for the history. The better way to get this information is with an API call:

See data in browser:
/api/v2/discussions?dateInserted=&type=question&status=answered&hasComments=true

Download CSV of Data:
/api/v2/discussions.csv?dateInserted=&type=question&status=answered&hasComments=true

That's going to pull a list of all discussions that have a status of 'Answered' - meaning they have a comment but no comment has been marked as the 'best answer' yet.

Let us know if that works for you!

The ever-relatable problem: Questions are getting answered… but they’re not always getting marked as answered.

At first, that feels like a small thing. But if the goal is to build a self-sustaining community ecosystem, it has a real impact - especially if you care about ticket deflection, search/GEO success, and whether your community is actually reducing pressure on your support team. When answers aren’t clearly marked as The Solution, users hesitate. They keep searching, they second-guess The Solution, or they give up and open a ticket anyway.

What this little #TipTuesday is going to touch up are things you can do within your Vanilla community to solve this problem - and how you can do it without chasing users or adding busywork for your moderation teams.

Question Resolution Matters

When a question isn’t marked as answered, a few subtle things start to happen. Other members don’t fully trust the reply, even if it’s correct. Search results feel less decisive. And for users who just want to solve a problem and move on, that uncertainty is often enough to push them toward your support queue instead of self-serve.

Resolved questions in a community are one of the clearest indicators that peer-to-peer support is actually working. Over time, communities with higher resolution rates tend to see fewer repeat questions and fewer escalations - not because people stop asking for help, but because answers become easier to find and trust.

Getting A Baseline

Before trying to improve resolution, it helps to know where you stand today.

A simple way to do this is to navigate to this endpoint in your community: /discussions/unanswered/ and just going down the list to see what is marked as 'Accepted' and what is just marked as 'Answered' (or the dreaded 'Unanswered'). We're mostly interested in any question that doesn't have an 'Accepted' status yet.

Digging into this a bit can surprise you. Certain product areas or question types resolve cleanly, while others lag behind. That’s useful - it tells you exactly where small changes will have the biggest payoff.

Encourage Resolution (without friction)

This is where a lot of people hesitate. Nobody wants to nag users or send awkward reminders to mark answers.

You don’t have to. Vanilla has Q&A follow-up email notifications that gently handle this for you. Once enabled, these emails automatically go out when a user’s question has received replies but hasn’t been marked as answered yet.

You can turn this on in Dashboard → Settings → Addons, and then edit the settings next to the Q&A addon (/settings/qna).

The timing and tone matter here. These emails arrive when an answer already exists and are framed as a helpful check-in, not a scolding. For a lot of communities, simply enabling this feature leads to noticeably better resolution rates within a few weeks. It’s one of those “set it and forget it” changes that quietly improves outcomes.

When Staff Step In

Another thing worth calling out - especially for newer community managers - is that you don’t always need to wait for the original poster to mark an answer.

If it’s clear a question has been solved, moderators and community managers can accept an answer on the user’s behalf. This is particularly helpful when the original poster never comes back, when new users don’t realize they should mark answers, or when a high-visibility thread should clearly show as resolved for future readers.

You’re not answering for the user - you’re closing the loop based on what’s already there. When you’re reviewing questions in the admin and see one that’s clearly resolved, accepting the answer takes seconds and makes that thread far more valuable to everyone who finds it later.

Recognizing Good Answers

Marking an answer as accepted isn’t just cleanup - it’s recognition.

Accepted answers often trigger points, badges, or movement on leaderboards, which reinforces helpful behavior. But there’s also room to go beyond the automated rewards. When you notice consistently strong answers - especially from quieter experts who aren’t chasing visibility - calling that out can make a big difference.

Highlighting an answer in a newsletter, starting a short discussion that showcases a great troubleshooting example, or even sending a quick thank-you message helps reinforce that quality matters. When others see that behavior recognized, they’re more likely to emulate it.

Tying to Ticket Deflection and ROI

From a support perspective, resolved questions do more than help the person who asked them.

They show up more confidently in search. They reduce duplicate questions (which can clutter up a community). They give future users a clear stopping point - this Solution solved the problem. And over time, they build trust that the community can actually answer real issues.

If you’ve ever used the Vanilla ROI Calculator (/analytics/v2/dashboards/roi-roi), this is exactly the behavior it assumes. Users find answers in the community instead of opening tickets, and support teams spend less time handling repeat issues. Improving resolution rates makes those ROI projections much more realistic.

To the outside world, questions with accepted answers get a specific structured data assignment (QAPage with the accepted answer comment clearly marked) which is absolute gold for the purposes of GEO. AI Bots remember the sites that are easy to browse for answers.

Building The Habit

You don’t need to aim for perfect resolution to see results. Even small, consistent improvements (especially in high-volume categories) add up quickly.

The communities that see the most progress usually do a few simple things well: they establish a baseline, enable Q&A follow-up emails, let staff model good behavior by accepting answers when appropriate, and make a habit of reviewing unresolved questions during regular health checks.

None of this requires heavy moderation. It’s not about enforcing rules—it’s about building a rhythm that helps your community support itself.

The Big Picture

For enterprise communities, question resolution is a real maturity signal. It shows when a community is moving beyond conversation and into scalable, peer-led support.

And when that happens, the payoff isn’t just better engagement. It’s fewer tickets, faster answers, and a support organization that can focus on what truly needs human attention.