Your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community includes the Dashboard. This admin-only space provides access to everything you need to build and run your community.
✔️ TIP: Use this article as a helpful resource while you're setting up your Vanilla community.
Access the Dashboard
- Click the MeBox.
- Select Dashboard.
The Dashboard has four main tabs:
- Appearance
- Moderation
- Settings
- Analytics
Each tab is discussed in detail below.
Appearance tab
Branding & SEO
- Customize your community Homepage Title, Site Description, Banner Title, and Organization to increase SEO.
- Customize your Banner Logo, Mobile Banner Logo, Banner Image, Favicon, Touch Icon, Share Image, and Mobile Address Bar Color to incorporate your organization's branding.
Style Guides (aka Themes)
- Customize your community's Theme using our Foundation style guide as your base, as it will include all of our latest features by default.
- Use our Editor to create a copy of our Foundation Theme and apply changes to update the look and feel of your community.
Layouts
Set the Layout for the following pages:
- Homepage - Enable the Layout Editor to create a completely custom layout, or choose from the following legacy options: Discussions, Categories, Knowledge (if enabled), Trending.
- Discussions - Enable the Layout Editor to create a completely custom layout, or choose from the following legacy options: Modern Layout, Table Layout, or Foundation Layout.
- Categories - Modern Layout, Table Layout, Mixed Layout, or Tiled Layout.
Check out this article to learn more about the legacy layouts.
Moderation tab
Messages
Moderation Messages can be used to inform users of different types of information or instructions, like notifying them of scheduled maintenance for your product, a short Welcome message to users, information on how to post questions or product feedback in a particular category, or how to contact the Community Manager.
Learn more
Users
A list of your community's users. On this page, you can add users, edit and delete existing users, search for users, and Spoof user accounts.
- Search for users by name or email, optionally using % as a wildcard (%Smith to list all users with Smith in their username or %@vanillaforums.com to list all users with a @vanillaforums.com email address). You can also search by user ID, the name of a role, or “banned.”
Learn more
Ban Rules
Set up Ban Rules to deny community access to specified users and/or groups. Individual and group bans can be set by:
- IP address,
- email address,
- name, or
- fingerprint.
User access to the community is then dependent on whether it is a:
- Private community - banned users cannot access the community.
- Public community - banned users still have Guest access (i.e., view only).
Learn more
Applicants
The Applicants page is where two types of user applications are queued, if applicable in your Vanilla community. Refer to the articles below to learn more.
Learn more
Badge Requests
Users can request that a badge be given to them; this page is where those requests are queued for Admin approval.
Learn more
Flood Control
Here, you can configure settings to control the number of discussions, comments, activity, and private conversations users can publish within a given timeframe to help prevent spam. The default settings should be appropriate for the majority of communities, but it's recommended to review them to see if adjustments are necessary for your community.
Learn more
Spam Queue
A list of content that has been flagged as spam by users, Administrators, and Moderators. By default, content will be removed from the community and appear in this list after receiving five Spam reactions by regular users or one Spam reaction from an Admin/Mod.
Learn more
Moderation Queue
The Moderation Queue is where user-generated content is queued and must be reviewed by an Admin before it will display publicly in your community.
Learn more
There are several reasons and ways for user content to end up in the Moderation Queue to be reviewed by an Admin. Learn more about each of them in the articles below:
Change Log
A list of ALL deleted content and changes made to content within the community. Click Restore to undo any change or Delete Forever to remove it permanently.
📝 NOTE: Not all changes will appear in this list. Any changes that will not appear will show an additional message notifying you this would be a permanent deletion. Changes made within 20 minutes of the initial publish time will not appear in the log.
Learn more
Settings tab
Forum
- Categories - Organize community content by a Category and subcategory structure.
- Posting - Define basic settings for your community's Discussions and Categories.
- Sub-communities - Sub-communities are available to Corporate and Enterprise customers. Create sub-communities based on product, language, or other.
- Idea Statuses - When the Ideation addon is enabled, you can apply statuses to ideas. This helps to both organize your ideas and give an update about them to your users. Instead of creating new statuses, we recommend reviewing the default ones and editing them, if needed. The default statuses are: Active, Already Offered, Declined, Completed, In Progress, and In Review.
- Reactions - Reactions allow your users to "rate" discussion posts and comments. You can have positive and/or negative Reactions. Positive Reactions to discussions/comments will, by default, award 1 point to the post's score and 1 point to the user's score. Negative Reactions will, by default, remove 1 point from the post's score but not remove a point from the user's score. SPAM and Abuse reactions will however remove 1 point from the post's score and remove 1 point from the user's score.
- Rules - Community Rules is a feature of the Warnings and Notes addon that enables Administrators to create Rules that can be used when warning members for behaviours that violate the community guidelines.
- Tagging - In addition to Categories, Tags can be used to help organize discussions into topical groupings. By default Admins/Mods can create tags while members can only apply tags to discussions from the tag list. You can award the permission for Members to create tags by modifying the Roles & Permissions.
Technical
- Embedding - Enables you to embed your Vanilla community by inserting a snippet of code to your website page, and is an option if you want to insert your community into a site quickly. The snippet points to JavaScript and the community is embedded into the page via an iFrame. Keep in mind that embedding your community can increase the load time of a community page.
- Language Settings - List of languages that can be made available in your Vanilla community, allowing users to browse in their native language. Selecting one of these languages does not translate user-generated content, but it will translate UI content that is core Vanilla, such as quick links in the side panel, profile settings, etc. You must enable the Multilingual addon for these languages to appear in the footer of the community. NOTE: If you're looking to have content separated by language for a holistic user experience, we recommend using subcommunities.
- Outgoing Email - Set the email addresses that will be shown when sending notifications by email. By default, these will be the account owner; however, we recommend updating this to either a noreply email or a live inbox like hello@xxxx.xx or support@xxxx.xx, etc.
- Security - Provides various security settings, including external URL notifications, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) settings, and specifying an allowlist of trusted domains (e.g., yourdomain.com) that are safe for redirects and embedding.
API Integrations
This section includes various pages dedicated to managing your API integrations.
Import
Use this tool to bulk-import users from standardized CSV files.
Appearance
- Avatars - Set a Default Avatar for all users registering to your community. Allow users to change their own avatar or use select one from an Avatar Pool.
- Email - Enable HTML emails to edit the Email Notification layout. You can update: Email Logo, Text Color, Background Color, Page Color, Button Text Color, Button Background Color.
- Pockets - Pockets can be used to place additional code for theming, adding tracking scripts for tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, heatmap tools, etc. Learn more.
- Custom Domain - Add your custom subdomain to quickly brand your community.
- Customize Theme - Enable HTML and CSS Stylesheets of your theme. NOTE: This is only available when using the Keystone theme and enabling our old Theming UI.
Membership
- Roles & Permissions - Set up permissions based on user Roles. By default, all communities will have the following Roles: Guest, Unconfirmed, Applicant, Member, Moderator, and Administrator. Additional Roles can be created with custom permissions.
- Registration - Set your community's default registration method:
- Basic - New users fill out a simple form and are granted access immediately.
- Approval - New users must be reviewed and approved by an Administrator before having access.
- Invitation - Existing members can send invitations to new members.
- Connect - New users are only registered through SSO plugins: jsConnect, oAuth, SAML, JWT JSON Web Token.
- User Profile - Set a redirect URL for the user profile page (instead of displaying Vanilla's).
- Custom Profile Fields - Create additional fields that can be added to user profiles and filled out by users. This will require the Profile Extender addon to be enabled.
- Ranks - Hierarchal Ranks that a user can achieve based on given conditionals/requirements. Ranks can be assigned to a user to grant or remove certain privileges in your community. Learn more.
- Spoof - When the Spoof addon is enabled, Admins can log into the community as another user. This is often used for troubleshooting issues that a user is experiencing.
- Badges - Manage your Badges on this page. Users can earn Badges for three main reasons: performing actions (e.g., the user uploads a profile picture), a threshold is met (e.g., user has been a member for five years), or via reactions (e.g., user’s comment received five likes).
Connections
Social Media - The following Social Connect Addons are available and can be used for SSO:
- Steam Connector
- Zendesk
- Facebook Social
- Twitter Social Connect
- Linkedin Social Connect
- Microsoft Account
- Github Account
- Google Sign In
- Microsoft Account
Addons
Check out the article below to learn everything you need to know about all of Vanilla's available addons.
Analytics tab
Vanilla Analytics
If you're on our Essential or higher plan, you will have Vanilla Analytics automatically enabled. This will allow you to use all of our out-of-the-box dashboards, and be able to create your own custom dashboards and charts.
Vanilla Statistics
If you're on our legacy Business plan, you will see our Vanilla Statistics under the Analytics tab where you will find a graph which gives you insights into your community's metrics. You can adjust the time frame from the top right calendar picker and choose to view the graph by Month, over longer time frames, and by Day, for shorter time frames.
- Users - Number of new Users who have joined the community within the chosen time frame.
- Discussions - Number of new Discussions published to the community within the chosen time frame.
- Page Views - Number of Page Views on the community within the chosen time frame. This will include page views made by Guests.
- Comments - Number of new Comments published on the community within the chosen time frame.
Recent News
In this section of your Analytics Dashboard, you will find the most recent blog articles and news from the Vanilla team. This is a great resource to keep yourself up to date on both community best practices and the most recent Vanilla updates.