Vanilla Forums Blog

After many months of development, we are very excited to unveil a new Rich Editor, an enhanced WYSIWYG  (what you see is what you get) experience. This project has been the culmination of much work amongst several developers on our team and we are so happy to finally share it with you.

(left to right: Vanilla Forums Developer, Adam Charron and  Vanilla Forums co-Founder Todd Burry chat with Head of Community, Adrian Speyer about the new rich editor)

Why even bother with a new editor?

Certainly, there are many people who will wonder why we bothered. Wasn’t our current advanced editor adequate? As with most things in Vanilla, we always strive for a better user experience and we drove to rethink the editor from the core. We paid careful attention to the kinds of editors people are now used to using, and what they have to expect.

As co-founder of Vanilla, Todd Burry noted “For most people our Advanced Editor was good enough, but we couldn’t have a true WYSIWYG experience, so we needed to move to a more modern architecture. Making this change will allow us to expand the editor for future features and projects we have planned in the not too distant future. This is only the first step, and the initial release for this project, but many exciting things are planned.”

Automation. It’s a word that denotes simplifying repetitive tasks. Marketing Automation refers to a software your marketing department is probably already using to automate many repetitive tasks related to email marketing and website actions. It’s certainly very powerful and something that you, as the owner of your online community, want to explore in connecting to your activities.

Acer is one of the largest PC makers in the world. Its products include desktop and laptop PCs, tablets, servers, storage devices, displays, peripherals and more. One of Acer's top product lines is its gaming PCs and accessories, marketed under the Predator and Nitro brands.

We had a chance to talk with Brad Bliven, Senior Program Manager of Global Digital Services at Acer. Bliven was instrumental in getting the Acer community off the ground back in 2012. Since then, it's become a crucial channel for their service organization.

As part of our ongoing commitment to delivering best-in-class online community solutions, we’re proud to announce our partnership with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest content delivery and security service providers, powering more than 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Internet properties protected by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with each new site added.

With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) taking effect in only a few days, many community managers have been trying to understand how to comply with the new European privacy regulation.  If you run a customer community forum, you might have some outstanding questions about GDPR.

Please note that we are not lawyers and these are new laws that have not yet been interpreted by the courts, so some of the rules remain a bit ambiguous.  You should consult with your corporate legal department about data privacy questions.