There are two main pages where you can browse content in your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community:
- Recent Discussions page
- All Categories page
Recent Discussions page
The Recent Discussions page lists all of your Vanilla community's discussions, ordered by most recently commented on or created. In other words, it's the best way to quickly catch up on the latest conversations happening across your Vanilla community.
- Click a discussion to view it in full on its details page.
- Each user will only see the discussions they have access to see, which is based on their Role and the associated Category's permissions.
- Admins can flag a discussion as an announcement on the Recent Discussions page. Doing so causes it to be "pinned" to the top and have the "Announcement" indicator.
View your Followed discussions
By default, the page lists all discussions you have access to see; however, click the View dropdown and filter by Following to view only the discussions associated to the Categories you're following.
- In large communities, this makes it easier to browse for new activity in the discussions you're most interested in.
Pagination
Your community Administrators can set the maximum number of discussions to display per page; any discussions above this number are accessible via the pagination buttons at the top left.
📝 NOTE: There can be a maximum of 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, or 100 discussions per page.
All Categories page
This page displays the Categories that are set up for your Vanilla community. Categories are the high-level organizers of your discussions, and each discussion must be placed in a Category.
- While the Recent Discussions page is a great way to see discussion activity across all Categories, the All Categories page provides a more topic-based approach, allowing you to dive into specific topics that interest you and view only their associated discussions.
View your Followed Categories
The All Categories page lists all Categories you have access to see, by default; however, click the View dropdown and filter by Following to view only the Categories you're following.
- In large communities, this makes it easier to browse for new activity in the Categories you're most interested in.
Category actions
Each Category has an ellipsis (...) menu to the right, providing the following options:
- Mark Read - As you can see in the image below, the General Category has bold text; this indicates unread comments in one or more of its discussions. If you want to quickly get a "clean slate" to make it easier to see whether there's new content in the future, use this option to flag all associated discussions as read at once.
- Unfollow - You can Follow Categories on their pages via the bell icon. This option allows you to unfollow one or more Categories easily from the All Categories page rather than visiting them individually to do so.
