Vanilla Forums Documentation Posting & Content

Manage your Automation Rules

Automation Rules are a versatile tool that can be configured to trigger several important actions for your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community.

In many ways, they work as "virtual assistants" that allow you to automate tedious and time-consuming actions that likely need to be performed across your community on a daily, weekly, and/or monthly basis. Ultimately, they enable your organization's community managers to spend their time and energy focusing on their most important responsibility: Increasing member engagement.

Turn Automation Rules ON/OFF

Access the Dashboard.
Navigate to Settings > Addons > Labs.
Locate the Automation Rules section and toggle the slider ON/OFF to control whether Automation Rules are available in your community.

Access Automation Rules

Access the Dashboard.
Navigate to Settings > Automation > Automation Rules.

📝 NOTE: There's also a page dedicated to Automation Rules that you have run. You can learn more about that page in the View Automation Rule history section at the end of this article.

Rule Triggers and Actions

A Rule Trigger is the "prompt" that causes a Rule to run.
A Rule Action is what happens when the Rule is triggered.

Let's take a look at the available Triggers and Actions.

📝 NOTE: The Trigger you select determines which Actions are available (i.e., not all Actions are available for all Triggers). In other words, you cannot mix every Action with with every Trigger; this is done intentionally to protect the integrity of your community.

These Triggers and their associated Actions enable you to automate numerous tasks across your Vanilla community.

Triggers

Post management triggers

Post received reports
Post receives a minimum of points
Sentiment of the post
Time since added to collection
Time since post has had no activity
Time since a post has had no comments
Time since question has been unanswered
Votes on an idea

User management triggers

New/updated profile field
New/updated email domain
Time since registration

Actions

Post management actions

Add Discussion to Collection
Add tag
Bump post
Change status (ideas only)
Close post
Create Escalation
Escalate to Zendesk
Escalate post to Github
Move post
Follow a specific category
Remove from collection
Remove from trigger collection

User management actions

Assign/remove role
Follow category
Invite to group

Note about point thresholds

When creating Rules leveraging the Trigger post receives a minimum of points, keep the following nuance in mind:

When a Rule with this Trigger is set to auto-run, posts that reach the configured point threshold will not trigger again even if they go below the threshold and then reach it again.

⭐️ EXAMPLE:

Our Rule is set to auto-run and is configured to bump posts that receive 10 points (i.e., upvotes).
A post in our community, I Love Dogs!, reaches the 10-point threshold and triggers our Rule.
It then gets downvoted to 9 points and subsequently upvoted back to 10 points.
It will not trigger our Rule again

📝 NOTE: This nuance only applies to auto-run Rules; using this same example in the context of manually run Rules, the I Love Dogs! post will trigger our Rule multiple times even if its points total fluctuates below and back above the point threshold.

Create an Automation Rule

In this section, we're going to:

begin by taking a high-level look at the creation process so you understand the basics
and then build an example Rule to illustrate the nuance of how it's done. Walking through the creation of our example Rule should give you the knowledge necessary to build your own.

Creation overview

To begin the process, click Add Rule.

On the resulting page:

Click the pencil icon to give the Rule a name.

✔️ TIP: Be as descriptive as possible to make it clear what the Rule's function is. Because you will likely build numerous Automation Rules over time, a best practice is to come up with a clear naming convention for you and other Admins to follow to make long-term management simpler.

Select your Rule Trigger to determine what will cause the Rule to run (e.g., "Time since registration"). Additional configuration options will display related to the chosen Trigger.
Select a Rule Action to then determine what action Vanilla will take (e.g., "Assign/remove role"). Just like with Triggers, additional action-related options will display for you to configure.
As you work, keep an eye on the SUMMARY section at the top of the page: the configurations you apply will be displayed, helping you understand how your Rule will function.

Example Rule creation

Let's build an example Rule to dive a little deeper into this process. Hopefully walking you through Rule-creation with a real-world example will illustrate how it's done and give you the knowledge to build your own.

⭐️ Our goal is to create a Rule that will spotlight posts that aren't receiving engagement.

We'll give our Rule a descriptive name. Based on our Rule's goal, we'll go with: Bump posts w/ no engagement
Next, we'll select our Rule Trigger: Time since post has had no comments. This Trigger includes a few additional configuration options, as shown below:
1. A Trigger Delay is primarily useful in auto-run scenarios to create a "threshold" that future data must cross before triggering the Rule. In our case, we can use the Trigger Delay to define how long a post must exist before it will trigger our Rule. We want to give users several days to engage with new posts before artificially bumping them, so we'll set it to 3 Days. Now, posts must be at least 3 days old before the Rule will bump them.
2. We'll use the Post Type dropdown to define which post types should be affected by our Rule. We want all post types included, so we'll select them all. However, if you wanted to focus on only unanswered questions, for example, you could select only Question.
3. The Category and Tag options enable us to target our Automation Rule to only content in specific Categories or with specific Tags, which is a great way to further refine your Rules. 📝 These two options are only available for some post-related Triggers.
With our Rule Trigger configured, we'll then define our Rule Action. In our case, we want to bump posts so we'll select Bump post. 📝 This particular Action does not have any additional options to configure, but many do.
With our Trigger and Action configured, we now need to consider a few additional settings:
1. The Apply to new content only option controls whether only new content meeting the Rule's criteria (once it's enabled) will trigger it. In other words, enabling this feature means existing content will be ignored, and only new posts made after the Rule is enabled are affected. 📝 If this option is checked, the Look-back Limit option is unavailable.
2. Use the Look-back Limit option to exclude content past a specific age threshold the first time your Rule is run. For example, we don't want to bump posts older than 8 weeks, so we'll set it to 8 weeks . While setting a Look-back Limit is optional, it's useful in situations where you don't want your Rule triggered by "old" data. 📝 In other words, a Look-back Limit enables you to set a cut-off point to limit the data the Rule will affect (e.g., preventing your Rule from pulling in data that is months or even years old; in our case, we wouldn't want to bump discussions that are as old as that, so we set the limit to 8 weeks).
After configuring your Rule, it's a good time to use the Preview feature. This will show how much data (users, content, etc.) the Rule will affect if run immediately, as shown below. This information can prove useful in helping you understand whether further tweaking is necessary to achieve the results you want. 🛑 A Rule cannot be stopped once it is running, so always carefully review the data that will be affected before running a Rule.
Once the configuration is complete, we'll click Save to create our Rule. The Rule is now listed on the page and can be further managed at any time.

Now, we'll define how we want to run the Rule, which we'll learn more about in the section below.

Run your Rule automatically or manually

Once you've created a Rule, you need to decide how to run it: automatically or manually.

🛑 A Rule cannot be stopped once it is running, so always carefully review the data that will be affected in the Preview before running a Rule.

Run automatically

When set to run automatically, two actions occur:

Your Rule will run once immediately, executing on existing data meeting its criteria.
In addition, the Rule will continuously run over time, affecting all new data in your community meeting its criteria.

⭐️ EXAMPLE: If your Rule is configured to perform an Action based on a user having a certain profile field, it will run once and affect all users who currently have that profile field (according to your Rule criteria, of course), and then continue to execute as users register or update their profile fields in the future.

To auto-run your Rule:

Click the Auto-Run toggle on the main page.
When toggled on, the Preview popup will display; if you click Confirm, two actions will occur:
1. Your Rule will run immediately. The displayed Preview popup will indicate how much data (content, users, etc.) will be affected right now. ✔️ TIP: Review this data to make sure your Rule won't affect something it shouldn't.
2. In addition, the Rule will continue to run automatically moving forward, affecting all new data that meets the Rule's criteria (until Auto-Run is toggled off).

Run manually

Choose this method if you only want to run your Rule once.

Click the Rule's pencil icon on the main page.
On the edit page, click the ellipsis (…) menu at the top and select Run Once. The Preview popup displays and indicates the data (content, users, etc.) that the Rule will impact. ✔️ TIP: Review this data to make sure your Rule won't affect something it shouldn't.
Click Confirm in the popup to run the Rule.

📝 NOTE: You can continue to run the Rule manually over time, as needed.

Rule running notifications

Rules that are currently running are clearly labeled in three locations:

On the Rule's configuration page:
On the main Automation Rule page:
On the Rule's History page (more on this page in the View Automation Rule history section below):

📝 NOTE: You cannot edit or delete a Rule while it's running.

Manage your Automation Rules

Let's learn about the various ways you can manage your Automation Rules.

Search for a Rule

You can quickly locate specific Rules via text in their titles and Triggers.

In the example below, you can see that searching "rule" gives us our two Rules with "rule" in their titles.

To search:

Type a word or phrase in the search bar.
Press enter on your keyboard or click the magnifying glass icon.

📝 NOTE: Do not wrap phrases with quotation marks: instead of searching "this is a phrase" search this is a phrase.

To remove a search filter and return your entire list of Rules, click the X in the search bar.

Filter your Rules

Filters allow you to trim down a large list of Rules based on one or more of the following filters:

Trigger
Action
Enabled/Disabled

To filter the list:

Click the filter icon.
In the dialog, select one or more filters.
Click Filter.

Once applied, the filter icon changes, as shown below.

To remove a filter and return your entire list of Rules, click the X next to the filter icon.

View Rule summary details

Click a Rule's title to expand/collapse its complete Trigger and Action details.

Edit & delete Rules

Click a Rule's pencil icon to edit any of its details.
Click a Rule's trashcan icon to delete it. 🛑 This action cannot be undone.

📝 NOTE: You cannot edit or delete a Rule while it's running.

View Automation Rule history

All Automation Rules that have been run are listed on the Automation Rule History page:

Dashboard > Automation > Automation Rule History

📝 NOTE: This page only tracks Rules run within the past 90 days.

Along with all of the same Rule details you can view on the main Automation Rules page (e.g., summary, last updated, last run, etc.), this page has several unique filters that make it ideal for managing the Rules you've run:

Use the Action Type dropdown to filter Rules by their applied Rule Action. For example, you can quickly view only Rules that Add a tag or bump a post.
Use the Updated filter to view only Rules that have been updated within the specified time period. Click the Updated calendar icon to set the date.
Use the Last Run filter to view only Rules that have been run within the specified time period. Click the Last Run calendar icon to set the date.
Use the Status dropdown to view Rules based on their current status: All, Success, Running, Failed.

📝 NOTE: Applied filters can be cleared via the Clear All button that appears when at least one filter is active. Filters can also be cleared individually within their menus.

View affected data

The AFFECTED column displays how much data was affected when the Rule was run.

Click these links to navigate to a page providing additional information about the users or posts affected.
In the example below, clicking Users: 20 will show us the name, email address, etc. of the 20 users that Rule affected.

View individual Rule's history

In addition to the dedicated History page discussed above, you can also view a single Rule's History details via its clock icon on the main Automation Rules page.