Best Of
🌟 Exciting News: Higher Logic Vanilla is Upgrading to AWS Hosting! 🌟
Hello Vanilla Community!
We're thrilled to announce that Higher Logic Vanilla is embarking on an exciting journey to enhance our hosting infrastructure by migrating to AWS, a cutting-edge cloud platform. This move represents a significant upgrade from our previous provider, Vexxhost, allowing us to deliver an even better experience for all our users.
This project has been in the works for over a year and our beta customers have been successfully using the platform for over 6 months so we believe now is the time to bring this improvement to the rest of the community!
Key Benefits of AWS Hosting:
🚀 Enhanced Performance: AWS offers faster and more reliable infrastructure, ensuring a more responsive experience across our community platforms.
🔧 Improved Scalability: With AWS, we can scale resources seamlessly to accommodate community growth and handle seasonal traffic spikes effectively.
💪 Greater Reliability: AWS provides high availability, robust disaster recovery capabilities, and superior uptime guarantees, minimizing disruptions and ensuring a resilient infrastructure.
🔒 Modern Security: Rest assured, our migration process maintains existing SOC 2 and ISO compliance standards, incorporating up-to-date security controls to protect your data.
Here is a link to our Trust Center
No Additional Cost to You:
We're excited to share that this upgrade comes at no additional cost to our valued Vanilla customers. You'll enjoy enhanced performance, reliability, and security—all without any extra expense.
Minimal Disruption:
We understand the importance of seamless transitions. Our migration process is designed to be minimally disruptive:
- Expected downtime for affected sites will be less than 10 minutes. In most situations the end user will not notice any changes at all.
- Your site's operation and functionality will remain unchanged; your users will notice faster page load times without any other noticeable differences.
- DNS updates will smoothly redirect users to the new AWS infrastructure.
Migration Schedule:
- Vanilla Development Sites: Already migrated.
- Beta Test Customers: Successfully moved.
- All Plan (Essential, Corp, Enterprise) Staging Sites: Moving between June 9th - June 13th.
- Corporate Plan Production Sites: Scheduled between June 23rd - July 4th.
- Enterprise Pan Production sites: TBD - After July 4th
For specific migration dates or any inquiries, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM). Additionally, stay updated by following our status page for real-time updates.
We're committed to ensuring a seamless transition and enhancing your experience on Vanilla. Thank you for being part of our community—we're excited about the future together on AWS!
Warm regards,
Matthew Crouse
Director Of Product Engineering
Higher Logic Vanilla

Re: How to get more deflection data
On a weekly basis we triage all Q&A without a best answer marked. This is done using CSVs uploaded into a mega spreadsheet. Depending on the last response we take different actions:
- Flag any that are waiting for additional help to our Support Team
- Ask the author if the query is still open if they haven't responded to follow up questions
- Ask the author to mark a best answer
After 6 weeks from the authors last comment, if they haven't responded to us we either close the thread or if there is a definite best answer we mark this ourselves.
So far the volume has been manageable and we've seen a lot of value for the business, customers, and other Community members from triaging them. We're starting to think about how we can tweak the process as we begin to scale. We've recently procured zapier so will explore if we can use this once Q&A status is an available trigger (I think it should be coming very soon).
In terms of Qualtrics, we have a survey that's always available for members to fill out. We've just about got an ideal sample size (it's taken about a year). It pops up for members every month and then is always available from a slider on the side of all pages:
On our roadmap for this year we're going to start looking at CSAT as well, one of the touchpoints will be after a best answer has been marked, this data will also feed into our deflection metrics.
#TipTuesday: Default Category Following & Notification Preferences
Last year Vanilla released Default Category Following and Default Notification Preferences. Let’s review why you should enable both features.
Setting Default Category Following for new members in your community can help streamline user engagements and encourage participation. By doing so, users are automatically subscribed to receive updates from specific categories, ensuring they stay informed about topics without needing to manually subscribe. This can enhance their experience by providing relevant content and update your members on important information.
In addition to category following, you can also enable Default Notification Preferences. Setting Default Notification Preferences in your community ensures that members receive important notifications via email or pop-ups. This convenience encourages consistent engagement by keeping members informed about relevant updates, discussions and activities within your community. This feature ensures that they stay informed and increases their involvement.
How many default settings should you enable? Determining the optimal number of default followed categories for your members depends on your community’s goals. If your community covers many topics and interests enabling all categories might trigger too many notifications and overwhelm users, it might be better to allow members to opt into following categories based on their interests. You will want all your members to follow essential categories such as “Announcements” or “Get Started Guide”, so these are great categories to set as default following. To foster interactions, consider incorporating an “introduce yourself” discussion within the “Getting Started” category. This way, whenever a new user joins, all members receive a notification, enabling them to extend a warm welcome.
When configuring Default Notification Preferences, it is tempting to enable all pop-ups and emails. While it may seem beneficial to keep members informed about all activities, it's important to consider the potential for notification overload. Instead, consider setting a moderate number of default notifications preferences and create a balance between keeping users informed and too many emails. By default, Vanilla sets out-of-the-box best practice default notification preferences, so make sure to review and adjust the settings to what makes sense for your community.
Ensure your community provides clear guidance on how members can personalize their notification settings according to their individual preferences and engagement level. Consider adding a Call-To-Action widget on your homepage encouraging members to update their notification preferences. This empowers members to customize their experience, receiving updates tailored to their needs, promoting a positive member experience without feeling overwhelmed.
Check out these articles to help you set Default Category Following and Default Notification Preferences.
Need help creating a “Get Started Guide”? Take a look at Justin’s #TipTuesday.
If you haven’t seen our last #tiptuesday post, check it out here! More tips, examples, and Higher Logic Vanilla product highlights will be shared every Tuesday 😊