Reactions are one-click responses to posts and comments. They enable your users to indicate an emotional ("Awesome!") or empirical ("Like," "Agree," "Vote Down") response without having to type a comment. This is important because it gives users a more "indirect" feedback mechanism when they may not have anything to add via a comment.
Required permissions
Users must belong to a Role with the following permissions to use Reactions:
Reactions > Negative > Add to use negative ReactionsReactions > Positive > Add to use positive Reactions
Benefits of using Reactions
Communities can use Reactions for a number of scenarios. All Reactions can be customized to meet your needs. Some benefits are:
- Positive reinforcement for contributions
- Increased participation and interaction
- Member-powered curation of content
- Enables skimming by high-reaction comments
- Optional integration with Badges for gamification
Reactions are a dynamic tool that encourage emergent behaviors and uses, and is one we recommend for most communities.
Turn Reactions ON/OFF
Reactions are a core feature in your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community, and are available out-of-the-box.
- Administrators are free to turn ON/OFF individual Reactions at any time to control which are available to your users.
- If Reactions are not a good fit for your community, simply turn all of them OFF.
To access your Reactions:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Posts > Reactions.
To enable or disable a Reaction, simply click its toggle, as highlighted in the image above.
- Generally, we recommend using one to four Reactions. Reacting should be simple and reflexive, not a complex decision over which Reaction to use.
- Reactions are universal to all Categories in your community. You can use CSS rules to hide certain Reactions in specific Categories, but they cannot be disabled natively within Vanilla.
How do Reactions work?
Below each post or comment, the Reactions you have enabled are available for users to engage with.
- You can click one (and only one) Reaction for each post. This will add or subtract points to the post and the author, as defined by that Reaction’s settings.
- The post will show a running tally of how many of each Reaction it has received.
- Click a different Reaction to switch how you reacted.
- Click the same Reaction a second time to revoke it.
Edit Reactions
You can edit the properties (e.g., name, description, point value) of each Reaction individually by clicking its associated pencil icon.
- Editing existing Reactions is the best way to modify the ones you want to use in your community.
- You cannot add new Reactions, so the best approach is to modify the titles and/or icons of the existing Reactions that best suit your purposes.
- Regarding points, it's important to understand the distinction between points being awarded to a post/comment and points awarded to a user.
- You cannot change the points a Reaction gives to a post/comment; the Points field only affects how many points are given to users.
⚠️ IMPORTANT: Updating a Reaction's default image only affects the image shown on a user's profile, not the image shown in a post or comment. To update icons for posts and comments, refer to the How to customize Reaction icons section below.
✔️ TIP: Doing this allows you to keep any automated badges associated with that Reaction, which you can then rename appropriately as well.
"Add" a Reaction
While you cannot add new Reactions for posts and comments, you can easily edit an existing one and repurpose it to suit your needs (e.g., change its name and/or points). If you do not have the appropriate staff resources to retheme the Reaction, consider working with the Reactions with the most suitable icons.
Advanced Reaction settings
On the Dashboard > Settings > Posts > Reactions page, click the settings icon to access the advanced Reactions settings.
In the resulting dialog, you can manage the following options:
- Show Who Reacted to Posts changes how Reaction tallies are displayed.
- The default is In a popup, which requires hovering your cursor over the Reaction to see who reacted that way. 📝 NOTE: Because the In a popup option requires hovering to display, it will not work on mobile devices.
- Use As avatars for small- to medium-sized communities to show a row of avatars under each comment for who reacted.
- Select Don’t show to hide it entirely.
- Best of Style changes the layout of your Best Of page: Tiles displays posts in a card-like format, while List displays post in a more traditional list format.
- Use the two Order options to order your Reactions by Date or Score.
- Use the Promote Threshold and Bury Threshold options to control how many points a post/comment must receive in order to be added to the Best Of page. Note that changes to points are not retroactive. For example, if you change the Promote Threshold from 5 to 10, older posts that are already on the Best Of page will not be removed.
✔️ TIP: Be sure to click Save at the bottom of the dialog to apply any changes.
Curating with Reactions
Reactions can provide your community with powerful self-curation tools. As you learned above, posts and comments that reach 5 points will be automatically added to the Best Of page. This means users with the proper permissions can help curate and highlight the best content across your community.
It’s important to understand your community (or the community you intend to build) before selecting what Reactions to use. Let's examine some of the ways users can self-curate content via Reactions.
Promote content
Promote is a special Reaction. Only users with the Garden > Curation > Manage permission (or that ability via Ranks) can use it.
- It assigns 5 points to the post or comment. The user that made the post receives the number of points indicated under that Reaction in your Dashboard.
- Discussions or comments with 5 or more points will be added to the Best Of page and will get the “promoted” CSS class added to them. These points can come from any type of Reaction.
- After content is added to the Best Of page, it is never removed, no matter what its future point total is. The “promoted” CSS class is reevaluated as point totals change. You can use this special class to style promoted content different (like highlighting it with a special background colour).
Bury content
Posts and comments that reach a score of -5 or lower will be buried. Buried posts and comments appear collapsed by default, and require a user to click on them before it can be read. When a discussion reaches the buried threshold, it will take on the behavior of being sunk. You can style buried comments using the “Buried” CSS class.
Abuse and Spam
Abuse and Spam Reactions are available to all users when enabled and have special actions attached to them.
- Five or more Abuse Reactions will add the content to the Moderation Queue for moderator review but the post will remain in the community. Ten or more will remove the post from the community but it will remain in the Moderation Queue for review. Check out this article to learn more about the Moderation Queue.
- Five or more Spam Reactions will move the content to the Spam Queue.
📝 NOTE: When users with the Garden > Curation > Manage permission use the Abuse or Spam Reaction it counts as five reactions. In other words, it takes five unique members to accrue five "points" but only one moderator/admin.
Negative Reactions
By default, negative Reactions remove 1 point from the post or comment, but they have no impact on the point total of the user who made the post. This discourages abuse of negative Reactions beyond simple voting scenarios.
📝 NOTE: Abuse and Spam Reactions, however, will remove 1 point from the discussion or comment and from the point total of the user who made the post.
🛑 IMPORTANT: There is always the potential for abuse when you open up avenues of self-curation in a community. In general, we discourage the use of any negative Reactions, unless there are established guidelines for their use in your community.
How to customize Reaction icons
Reaction icons display in your community in two places:
- User profiles
- Posts and comments
The icons in these two locations are customized in different areas of your Vanilla dashboard, as outlined in the sections below.
Customize Reaction icons for posts and comments
These icons are customizable on the Appearance > Branding & Assets > Manage Icons page.
From here, search "reaction" in the Icon Name field to view all post-based Reaction icons.
See Manage your Community's Icons to learn how to update these icons.
Customizable Reaction icons for user profiles
A user's profile displays the Reactions they have received from community members, providing an overview of how others are reacting to their content. These profile-based Reaction icons are customizable.
To customize these icons:
- Navigate to Settings > Posts > Reactions.
- Click a Reaction's edit button.
- In the dialog, click the Browse button in the Image field.
- Upload an SVG image file to replace the default.
Notes
Showcase the best content on the Best Of page
All content that receives 5 points or more is highlighted on the Best Of page, which is added to the Quick Links area when Reactions are enabled. This makes it easy to automatically and dynamically showcase the best content.
To learn more about this page, check out:
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
