Best Of

Reactions turn quiet readers into active participants with one click to say “this helped,” “insightful,” or “🎉 awesome!” Without even typing a reply, members can elevate the best content, guide others to answers, and fuel your engagement flywheel.

Why use Reactions

Think of Reactions as your community’s high‑five. They lower the barrier to engagement so more people participate with one tap for even the lurkers.

They also help the community self‑curate: high‑scoring posts surface on Best Of, so newcomers find the good stuff faster. Posts will rack up views, leading to becoming the canonical answer the next time the question pops up. That’s Reactions quietly doing heavy lifting in the background.

And because Reactions can award points, they plug right into your badges and long‑term recognition strategy for contributors.

Best‑practice setup

• Keep it simple: enable 1–4 clear Reactions so the choice is fast and consistent. Decision fatigue is real.
• Encourage positive signals (Like, Insightful, Celebrate) and use negative ones sparingly. Document the when/why so they aren’t misused.
• Activate the special Promote Reaction for trusted Roles; it gives +5 points and spotlights can’t‑miss content on Best Of.
• Tune visibility: show “who reacted” as a popup or a row of avatars, or hide entirely by choosing what fits your culture and scale.

Pro tip: Pair these settings with a short “How we React here” snippet in your guidelines so members know what each Reaction means in context.

Quick how‑to: enable and fine‑tune

• Go to Dashboard → Settings → Posts → Reactions to toggle specific types and edit names, descriptions, and how many points users earn.
• Open Advanced settings to choose “who reacted” display (popup vs. avatars), set Best Of order (date vs. score), and adjust promote/bury thresholds.
• Confirm Role permissions so the right people can use positive/negative/curation Reactions (e.g., Garden > Curation > Manage for Promote).

Try this today: pick your core 3–4 Reactions, set Promote Threshold to match your community’s traffic, and add a short note to your posting guidelines explaining what each Reaction means.

Make them on‑brand: customize icons

A small visual tweak goes a long way. There are two places to update Reaction visuals, depending on where the icon appears:

• Posts and comments: Appearance → Branding & Assets → Manage Icons; search “reaction” and replace defaults with your SVGs for the reaction bar.
• Profile tallies: Settings → Posts → Reactions → Edit a Reaction → upload an SVG to change how that Reaction appears on user profiles.

Tip: Use simple, high‑contrast SVGs with a proper viewBox for crisp rendering across sizes and themes.

A few thoughtful choices here will compound: faster answers, clearer curation, and a brand‑consistent experience that’s genuinely fun to use. Know that your content is making an impact even if readers don't have a moment to write up a post. Every click matters!

In today's #TipTuesday I would like to focus our attention on something no one is talking about these days: AI. Wait, what? You have heard about it?

I've been designing and building web-based software for a long time. As in, there was only one "CSI" when I started. A long time ago. I'm talking "Gladiator", "Cast Away", "Oops I did it again". Remember when websites had "Y2K Compatible" banners on them to reassure you? I did those.

So, I don't need to tell you that I have seen more than one "new thing" come out. Yes, I was a little skeptical about AI. But having sipped a tiny bit of the potion I have come to see that it only enhances my, already considerable, talent (humblebrag). It is freeing me from the technical minutia, and time constraints, and allowing me to be creative. It's not gunning for my job, it's gunning for my success.

If you're a community manager, you understand Community — not just the platforms that they run on. Your super-power is facilitating conversations and getting eyeballs to go where they should, not mucking around with software. You have ideas that you would love to execute but lack the time and technical resources to do them. Your time (and resource) has come. Let's use AI to build a simple HTML widget in Vanilla, just for fun.

I created this in a few minutes using Claude.ai but I'm sure any AI software will do the same job. I'm lazy, so instead of typing, I talk to it. For Claude, on MacOS, I double click on the cntrl key. And then it's just talking:

Hi Claude, I want to build an HTML widget for my Vanilla community that is simply HTML and text. I want there to be three blocks of text in this order:

Even though this is the first text in this box

you will read this first

and you will read this second.

"Even though this is the first text in this box" is actually the highest placed block on the page, "You will read this first" is the second block on the page, followed by "and you will read this second" is the third block. And the CSS is designed to make the "You will read this first" visually more prominent and the "Even though this is the first text in this box" is visually less striking and is, therefore, the last thing a reader's eye is drawn to.

Claude does its thing and gives me some generic HTML and CSS. And then I add:

Terrific, now can you capture colors and fonts, background colors, from our community banner and make the contrasts even more striking? Can the You will read this first be in all caps, centered on more than one line? Can the last line be right aligned?

and I upload this screen shot:

(I'm always polite to the robots. For when they take over the world…)

Then, badabing badaboom Claude creates the HTML and CSS:

I then copy the CSS into a CustomHTML Widget on my site:

Then the HTML:

And voila:

So here's your challenge: take your first step this week and build a custom widget. Try my prompts but with the screen shot from your site. Get more creative than I have in this demo - add a link to something meaningful, ask AI to give it a background image, use your imagination. Remember, you can create custom widgets that only you can see while you're experimenting, or work on your staging site if you have one. The key is to just jump in and get your feet wet. The community managers who embrace AI as a collaboration tool today will be the ones setting the new standard for what's possible tomorrow.

Hey @KMoosman

I recently went live with ideation just over 3 months ago and its been an excellent addition to our Community. I've setup dedicated ideation categories for some of our selected products and these exist separately from the discussion categories for those products.

I'm still trying to navigate, or at least think of, the best way of handling ideas now that custom post page layouts are available which allow ideas to be created within the same discussion category as well (we're yet to upgrade to custom post page layouts). For example, whether to keep ideation separate or mix them in with the main discussion categories and what impact that will have.

It was a little hacky but I've setup an Ideas & Feature Requests 'home page' of sorts which then displays the latest ideas from all of the dedicated idea subcategories. I don't want users creating ideas to that home page, but still have the ability to create an idea from it so I've removed the New Post button and replaced it with a CTA widget that opens to the new idea post creation page. Not sure if that's the best way to handle it but it works.

I think visibility and ease of access is important for users so I've also setup a bunch of 'fake' redirect categories within the related product discussion pages so that users are aware of, and can easily access ideation.

Lastly, I've added CTA's to act as buttons that trigger the discussion widget within a product idea category to filter based on specific idea statuses. I think its easier than relying on users to use the filter on the widget themselves as its not obvious.

Not sure if that helps you at all (hopefully it does!) but let me know if you have any questions.