Overview
Release 2026.010 introduces several major platform improvements focused on trust and safety, structured content creation, extensibility, and front-end stability.
This release adds new Digital Safety Act moderation and appeals workflows to help communities manage reports, removals, bans, warnings, appeals, and moderation history with greater transparency and consistency.
For developers and advanced community teams, this release includes an upgrade to React 18 and introduces Widget Builder Data Sources, making it possible to securely connect custom widgets to third-party APIs without exposing sensitive credentials. Together, these updates make Vanilla more flexible, more transparent, and better equipped for complex community workflows.
Schedule
- Staging: Week of Jun 15
- Production: Week of Jun 22
- Enterprise: Week of Jun 29
Digital Safety Act Moderation and Appeals Workflows
Vanilla now includes new Digital Safety Act support to help communities manage moderation actions with greater transparency and consistency. These updates are designed to support customers with DSA-related compliance needs while also improving trust-and-safety workflows for any community that wants clearer moderation processes.
Toggle for DSA Features
Admins can enable DSA-specific behavior for communities that require stricter notice, appeal, and transparency workflows. When enabled, users and moderators have a more complete path through the moderation lifecycle: content can be reported, reviewed, actioned, explained to the impacted user, appealed when appropriate, and logged for later review.
Guest Reporting
This release adds support for guest reporting, allowing content to be reported through a Notice and Action-style flow even when the reporter is not signed in. Trusted reporter handling has also been added so reports from designated trusted reporters can be escalated for priority moderator review.
Transparent Content Removal
Moderators now have clearer workflows for content removal, including the ability to capture and communicate a reason for the action. Removed content can appear as a tombstone instead of simply disappearing, helping users understand that moderation occurred and providing an entry point to appeal where applicable.
Users can now receive clearer notifications and emails when moderation actions are taken, including content removal, bans, and appeal outcomes. DSA-related communications can also support AI translation so users can better understand important moderation messages in their preferred language.
Appeals Workflows
This release also introduces a structured appeals workflow in Community Management Dashboard. Users can appeal eligible moderation decisions, and moderators can review appeal details, related content, original moderation context, and user-provided appeal messages before approving or rejecting the appeal. Appeal status updates help close the loop with the impacted user.
Additional Improvements
Additional moderator-facing improvements include updated ban and warning workflows, moderation context on user cards, expanded moderation activity logs, and reporting filters that make it easier to review removed content and moderation history. Together, these changes help community teams answer key moderation questions: what happened, who took action, why action was taken, and when it occurred.
Upgrade to React 18
We upgraded Vanilla’s underlying front-end framework to React 18. This update helps improve the security, stability, and performance of Vanilla communities. For most customers, this change will have no visible impact.
Customers with code customizations should validate their staging communities before this release is promoted to production. This is especially important for custom widgets built with Widget Builder, custom CSS or JavaScript added through HTML widgets, and custom front-end code added through Style Guide or code deploy workflows.
As part of this update, some class names may be compiled differently. If your customization targets class names in native Vanilla widgets, we recommend using attribute selectors, such as div[class*="xyz"], to select the relevant elements more reliably.
For code deploy customers, this is a significant framework update. Please update your local Vanilla development instances and confirm that any custom front-end code continues to work as expected with React 18.
More information about React 18 is available here:
https://react.dev/blog/2022/03/29/react-v18
Widget Builder: Data Sources
In this release we have a new feature which will allow custom widgets created in widget builder to both preload third-party API requests and securely make API requests through the Data Sources interface.
This should allow you to create custom widgets which load quickly and can access secure data safely.
You will find a new Data Source configuration screen where you will be able to configure a Data Source. Here-in you will be able to define:
- The specific root API url
- Which HTTP methods are supported
- Common and Secret Headers (such as access tokens)
- Access to the data source by Role and Rank
Widget creators can then use these data sources to securely make API calls right in their custom widget code without exposing any secrets. They can further configure a third-party API request to be securely fetched before the widget loads, just like native vanilla data so your end users never need to wait for a loading screen.